But it has not been my experience. Nor some of my peers. Despite a meh text editor, the Smalltalk IDEs (Smalltalk/V, VisualWorks, and VisualAge) were amazing. The original "refactoring" work done by John Brant and Don Roberts was pioneered at UIUC in these environments. Their adaptation to the different IDEs just improved them.

I remember sitting next to John and Don at OOPLSA and speculating that refactoring inside of Java (Eclipse was The New Editor at the time) should be superior in Eclipse vs Smalltalk because Java had more type information to work with. John and Don, both Smalltalk enthusiasts in those days, admitted they had anticipated that as well. And they did a bunch of work trying to port refactoring stuff to Eclipse. They were surprised to discover it wasn't so. But it's not typing vs not. It's simplicity vs not. When I asked if that meant that rising start Ruby would benefit from their refactoring work, they said that too was hard. Don explained that in a nut shell, it was the AST. Much of what tools/IDEs do is work with a model of the language. The Smalltalk AST had 15 polymorphic objects to represent its language model. Ruby was 90+ and climbing at the time. Java was insane. Their take was that while typing might add some information, the combinatorial explosion of modeling the language just made tooling for the language more difficult. It was an interesting insight.

Elixir/Erlang has a language model that is even simpler than Smalltalk in some ways. The trickiest part is the macros.