If you have read The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, you can see in this column the beginnings of the section in the book on collections. Once again, I mined the material from the image. Thinking back, I'm amazed at how important reading the image has been to me. I can remember being incredibly frustrated at having to spend all day looking for the method or class that I wanted, but then realizing at the end of the day that I had gotten more accomplished with six hours of reading and ten minutes of typing than I used to accomplish with ten hours of typing.

We may underestimate the value of a shared body of literature (the image) in creating and sustaining the Smalltalk culture. Perhaps that's why the visual “wire-and-fire” front-ends failed to have much impact-there was no corpus of visual code that everyone routinely consulted.