Does anyone remember Servant by Andy Hertzfeld? Which kind of blended the Finder with ResEdit, showing the resources just like it shows folders and files. Allowing to manipulate them the same way, for example copying via drag'n'drop etc.
> The sheer oddity + lack of real world example code floating around made it feel impenetrable
not sure if I understand you, but you have the code of the whole system at your fingertips. Which is certainly "real world" because you are running it :)
out of interest, which modern stacks allow "live coding" your application? That is: no need to restart for various changes you make. You are playing/changing/creating with the objects that make your aplication.
I am currently doing mostly Objective-C-programming in Xcode, which is a rather simple IDE in this respect.
In the past I used more java, but at this time only simple changes were possible live (using Eclipse back then), for a lot of others I had to compile and restart anyway.
Just wanted to mention that Thinking Forth "A Language
and Philosophy for Solving Problems" (also from Leo Brodie) is available here: http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/Servant_A_New_Shell_for_t...