The parent probably means live coding his app. If you do Ruby, think about creating your whole program in IRB. You can dump the memory anytime and reload the dump to continue from where you left.
Coding in IRB means that you have access to all the introspection and dynamic analysis while you're coding.
Gilad Bracha likes to push live programming in smalltalk via his newspeak work. No time travel though, which I don't think is supported by any smalltalk environment yet (you can change code via fix and continue, or objects via direct manipulation, but code changes do not update objects retroactively). So the Bret Victor style of live programming probably isn't supportable (without changes to be model/runtime).
Can you explain what you mean by that?
iirc You can step back through the execution stack in the debugger, change code or variable values; and when you resume the new code is used and the new values are used.