Comment by rbanffy

> The image meant you basically got whatever state the developer ended up with, frozen in time, with no indication really of how they got there.

I worked with a similar language, Actor (Smalltalk with an Algol-like syntax), and the usual way to deal with distribution was to “pack” (IIRC) the image by pointing to the class that your app is an instance of, and the tool would remove every other object that is not a requirement of your app. With that you got an image that started directly into your app, without any trace of the development environment.