CoExist: Preserving Immediate Access to Source Code and Run-time Information of Previous Development States

International audienceProgrammers make many changes to the program to eventually find a good solution for a given task. Every little change and the respective development state can be of value in future development situations when, for example, promising ideas suddenly turn out inappropriate or the interplay of objects turns out more complex than initially expected before making changes. Programmers would benefit from tool sup-port that provides immediate access to source code and run-time of previous development states of interest. We present IDE extensions, implemented for Squeak/Smalltalk, to preserve, retrieve, and work with this information. With such tool support, programmers can work without worries be-cause they can rely on tools that help them with whatever their explorations will reveal. They no longer have to follow certain best practices only to avoid undesired consequences of changing code