You had to be there. Those books were not available when I was using Smalltalk and not all programmers really “got” the system or the implications of their changes on their team.
You must have been a very early user, this was published in 1984 —
"At the outset of a project involving two or more programmers: Do assign a member of the team to be the version manager. … The responsibilities of the version manager consist of collecting and cataloging code files submitted by all members of the team, periodically building a new system image incorporating all submitted code files, and releasing the image for use by the team. The version manager stores the current release and all code files for that release in a central place, allowing team members read access, and disallowing write access for anyone except the version manager." (page 500)
1984 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment"
Without a defined software development process, that everyone habitually uses, we can usually make "a tangled mess of code" with any programming language.
