If you use an external database you are not going to get time travel debugging, nor will you have a perfectly uniform internal representation of values. Beads has a primitive type of physical units of measure, so you can store 3 Newtons which internally will be stored as the magnitude 3 plus an array of fundamental units with their exponents. This datatype is not found in MySQL, so external databases work okay as long as you aren't trying to time travel, and either limit yourself to very traditional COBOL era datatypes, or convert everything into string form like JSON has to do.

Beads also has addresses that can be written to the hard drive, because addresses in Beads are not pointers to RAM. How can you store a traditional C pointer into a MySQL database? You can't, you have use a key. which creates baggage.

The virtues of having a simple database inside the language, and a layout/drawing/event model are myriad, and I invite you folks to take it for a spin.

Some of the batteries-included integrated environments like VB6 and Borland Delphi are beloved by their users. Simplicity is wonderful, and i have tried so hard to make Beads simplify the very difficult task of making graphical interactive software.