I'm really interested if someone knows a programming language that uses an image like Smalltalk...
I think that is one of the greatest ides in the history of computer science.. I can not find other language besides Smalltalk that is base on an image.
I'm curious as to if the Smalltalk Image system scales.
If you had 20 programmers working on the same codebase, how does that work? Do they each have their own image, or do they share one?
If you make a code modification that requires a modification of your environment, and someone makes a different modification with similar requirements, can the images be merged (as with Version Control)?
Many Lisp systems are using 'images'. That's where Smalltalk got it from, possibly - since Lisp had images already before Smalltalk existed. The OS on the Lisp Machines were basically Lisp images (even hierarchical images with incremental delta images).
If you ask which language uses a similar way to organize source code (i.e. not in files), then again Xerox InterLisp did that. Apple's Dylan did that. Some DB development tools might do that.
Factor is a Forth with many high-level features and an image.
To answer Bill K's question: apparently it works just fine (though I've not tried version control in a team personally).
All Smalltalk systems do it a bit differently, though. There's a very interesting podcast all about it on The Stack Trace. Much of it applies to all image-based development environments.
I happened across this comment which I think gives a flavor of image based development.
'So while I can and do use the JVM for server-side computation, it’s a bit heavy weight for small and simple tasks. Common Lisp’s answer to this problem was an ingenious one. Instead of building programs that you run over and over, it offers an “environment” in which code is iteratively evaluated, so that you actually grow and nurture a burgeoning set of functionality within a long-running VM. I like this model when appropriate, and enjoy it, for example, in Emacs, which I can leave running for days on end while at the same time extending its functionality by writing new functions and customizing variables."
You could actually consider SQL databases as being image based - the data and the code (stored procedures) are all stored together in one big opaque blob.
By the definitions I can find, every Microsoft application (Excel, Access, Word, etc.) with VBA embedded would qualify, wouldn't they?
In fact, spreadsheets in general.