Joe Winchester expounds on the Smalltalk roots (idea-wise) of Eclipse, and then steps in it:

The Eclipse roll call, not only in terms of the core team that Mike has created around him, but in terms of its comitters and participants is like a who's who of the old Smalltalk rearguard. At Eclipsecon 2005 it's 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.

Oh? Can you modify the tools as they are running? And before you say that's absurd, what if I want to - on an ad-hoc basis - modify the tools in some way? Heck, using Smalltalk, I can do that to a running application - I've done that, as demonstrated here. With a tool like Eclipse? Sure, if you want to make the change in some limited (i.e., in one of the exposed APIs) way, and then either restart or start a new instance. Rinse, Repeat.

Heck, I have this level of "muckability" in my application server - the one that runs this blog. How do you think I modify it? I sure don't take it down and restart it. Eclipse is in no way, shape, or form "better" than a Smalltalk image. At best, it's a pale reflection, showing what a bunch of Smalltalk literate developers can do with a lower wattage language.

Ed Burnette has thoughts on this here.