Comment by igouy

> The OP has a good criticism of why this is a bad idea.

They simply assert "twiddling a run-time variable for debugging in your staging environment can propagate straight into a bug on production".

As-if straight into production without re-testing.

> Source control? What's that?

"ENVY/Manager augments this model by providing configuration management and version control facilities. All code is stored in a central database rather than in files associated with a particular image. Developers are continuously connected to this database; therefore changes are immediately visible to all developers."

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

~

1992 Product Review: Object Technology’s ENVY Developer

http://archive.esug.org/HistoricalDocuments/TheSmalltalkRepo...