I used to think so, then watched as javascript in the browser rose to be the premium application platform - where the user has access to a console/repl, developer tools etc...

I think many people would suggest that this was more of an accident due to the ubiquity of the browser, though.

The transition from "websites" to "web apps" was well underway by the time the dev tools became a built-in browser feature - Chrome was notable for being the first browser to release with the console, inspectors, etc out of the box, but that came later. The developer experience was quite a bit rougher in the early days, and then better but still not native in the days of plugins like Firebug.

The web becoming the premium app distribution platform was, firstly, because the web was the lowest-common-denominator distribution channel. Javascript was just the tool that was available where everyone wanted to run.

Yes, but maintaining a webapp isn't a nightmare due to the user being able to inspect css, edit html or access the javascript console?

The difference is the changes the user can make don’t flow back to the original. If the user hits refresh they get your copy of the web app, not theirs.

In several implementations you can strip the image down (to remove the dev tools, etc). And some let you ship as single file executables

Smalltalk being so malleable also makes it possible to completely disable source code inspection/execution.

And then what?

Say you made the foreground text color the same as the background text color, so you could no longer see the source code. You can no longer do anything. You can no longer save those changes. And then what?

Better, say you did that in a script file which additionally saved the image, so that image was now unusable. And then what?

The parent comment was talking about a deployed application, and making sure users can't modify the source code.

In that case, your image hopefully was built using source code from a VCS and no such changes will have been applied. This is not so different from building an app by pulling the latest version of the code from Git.

And if you did manage to commit changes that completely mess up your environment, you throw that image away, take a vanilla one and load your source code into it. Again, not so different from using Git.

So "possible to completely disable source code inspection/execution" really doesn't matter.

Plenty opportunity in many languages or systems to lock yourself out by doing something silly.

> Users can inspect and modify the entire system, no?

That should make the Smalltalk family popular with free software proponents. That makes me curious why that is not the case in history. The efforts of FSF on Smalltalk pale in comparison with those on C, Lisp and other languages.

C was only open until AT&T was allowed to charge for UNIX, and it became an international standard in 1989.

It was thanks to GCC that most folks actually got a free C compiler after those events, coupled with Sun starting the trend among UNIX vendors that developer tools would be extra license, no longer available on a regular UNIX installation.

> Users can inspect and modify the entire system, no?

End users? Yes if you - want them to - let them; No if you - don't want them to - stop them.

Correct, at least that was true when I was a Smalltalk developer.