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Comment by fnordsensei | Hacker News Reader

Please excuse the tangent, but is there any programming language that has done away with the file as a basic organizing unit of code?

Whenever I consider PL ergonomics (as I do now, in connection with this article), files come to mind as an incidental inheritance of file systems past.

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I think the Smalltalk systems that use image-based persistence[1] meet that criterion, despite the image itself eventually being persisted in a file system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persiste...

Smalltalk.

   “Java has come a ways towards that, 
    but made some fundamental mistakes. 
    I mean, source code in files. 
    How quaint. How 70’s.”

"Keynote on Smalltalk: eXtreme Programming to the Max" Smalltalk Solutions '99, Kent Beck.

http://home.balcab.ch/jpelrine/download/ss99.pdf

Do you consider modules to be "a basic organizing unit of code"?

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/features/understanding-java...

Do you have any alternative to files in mind? There are image-based systems like Smalltalk and some members of the Lisp family, but even in those cases, sources usually end up being stored long-term in files, as a matter of convenience.

> …but even in those cases, sources usually end up being stored long-term in files, as a matter of convenience.

Is that "the file as a basic organizing unit of code"?

Even when code is organized in applications and classes and versions… and persistence comes from a database, the database will be implemented using a computer file system.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ld6E19QIMo4C

In addition to Smalltalk, which was already mentioned, lisp and IIRC some implementations of forth also provided image-based development. Didn't really work out that well though.

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