Alan,
Did that book also have the "Officetalk" paper from PARC, by William Newman, Dan Swinehart, Tim Mott, etc.? That was an amazing blast from the past.
No it doesn't, I've never seen that one. It sounds very interesting, something I would like to see.
However, "Interactive Programming Environments" does include what at the time (like even now) were pretty interesting ideas. One section is called "Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Programming Environments" which talks about things like the Lisp Programmer's Apprentice and knowledge based program editing. That approach is something like "Here's an outline of my problem, suggest a code solution for me".
PARCs Warren Teitelman wrote up several articles on Interlisp. I remember being fascinated at the time by "A Display-Oriented Programmer's Assistant" which contained references to a 'Do what I mean' facility, which is a different flavor of the Smalltalk Transcript/Workspace/Debugger/cascading menus environment. Teitelman goes through a couple of programming examples in the Interlisp environment, and how the integration of the environment leads to an easier to use system. As an example, he's programming away in a Transcript Workspace and Debugger and INFORMAIL tells him he has an important email to read, so he pulls up the email, responds, and resumes debugging. At the time *I* was trying to poke a character into a PCs display buffer in assembler, and trying to figure out how I was going to afford to upgrade from a 160K floppy drive to one of the nice, new, big 360K drives for *all* my long term storage needs. You've noted that perspective is worth 100 IQ points (I agree entirely), I've noticed that having a "big boy" machine and the right tools can change your perspective in a hurry. Fortunately that machine dichotomy isn't nearly as bad now as it was then.
Adele Goldberg has a Smalltalk-80 paper, "The Influence of an Object-Oriented Language on the Programming Environment" in the book, and Richard Stallman extolls the virtues of something newish at the time called "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self Documenting Display Editor". Kernighan wrote up the UNIX programming environment. The last two didn't sound very useful to me in comparison to what other people in the book were doing. There are a couple of LISP Machine papers by Greenblatt et.al., and Winograd has his say in a couple of papers.
A blast from the past to be sure, but I'm surprised about how little the programming task has changed over the last twenty years, and how little modern programming environments help construct reasonable programs in a timely manner. My take on this area has mostly been that the machine should know more about nuts and bolts programming than I do. That should include not only conceptually simple minded things like "make my code run faster", but also "programmer coaching".
Jim