Joe Winchester, a committer on the Eclipse Webtools project, has written a nice post on his blog about the Smalltalk roots of Eclipse. He credits director Mike Milinkovich with "creating what can only be viewed on as a dream team".

At Eclipsecon 2005 it [was] amazing how many of the speakers, the companies exhibiting products, are the same ones who were part of the Smalltalk community, but also amazing how it is bigger and better than Smalltalk ever was.

Feature-wise, the comparison falls a bit short. On the one hand, we have features like the Java Browsing perspective, scrapbook pages, and edit-and-continue, which were clearly influenced by the Smalltalk experience. However, one of the nice things about Smalltalk is that the system was live and immediately changeable. Eclipse is not like that, yet.

For example, in Eclipse you can't change what a view is doing while you are running the view in the same instance. The best you can do is have a seperate instance of Eclipse and change what is going on there. Dynamic scripting, a feature I've long tried to get people excited about in Eclipse, could go far in providing this missing piece. GUIs described in text resources (XML or otherwise) that could be modified on the fly would help too. Anything that reduces the time between the thought to change something and trying out that change enables faster and faster development cycles.

I would go so far as to say that a "cycle" isn't what we need at all. "Cycles" come from the bad old days of edit-compile-link-debug, days which many of us are still trapped in due to our uninspired tools. Why is everyone so excited about Ruby on Rails? Because when you want to tweak something you save and refresh. Why are there so many emacs zealots out there? Same reason - instant gratification. Eclipse isn't there yet, but the genetic potential is there.

Read Joe's article here: Eclipse ide = Smalltalk.regroup();