I don't really understand this perspective, I remember using Smalltalk VisualWorks back in 2005 and it didn't even have syntax highlighting. I'm unclear why an IDE is more needed than another language. If anything java and c++ are way more IDE dependent because it's hard to know what parameters mean by their position, whereas in smalltalk they're named.
The IDE presents code in context — a method source is presented within the context of a class; a class source is presented within the context of superclass and sublcasses.
