I would say the main point of Smalltalk that everything is an object, including basic types and also classes (reflection). That make everything so much simpler and more consistent.
Having a 'live' IDE is nicely interactive, but it also has downsides, like a big image that stores side effects, bootstrapping issues when changing low-level stuff, and your program can break your IDE (corrupt the image), deploying an app is more complex because the image has to dangerously 'strip' itself of unneeded stuff.
So as a 'compromise' SmallJS has a very quick change-compile-run cycle of about a second or two, without the downsides mentioned above.
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