[Newbies] Why hasn't Smalltalk been wildly accepted?

[Michael Haupt]

Hi,

another 2 cents. Albeit I agree with what Keith writes, I doubt it's
really just marketing. I believe that is true for practitioners, for
whom I do not have any experience. I do have some experience with
students, though, both at undergraduate and graduate level.

Students have mostly accepted it as a powerful programming language
and appreciated its elegance and simplicity, and the standard
library's strength.

They have objected to three things: dynamic typing, access control,
and the image.

Dynamic typing... well, once they were shown how programming works in
a Smalltalk environment (incremental application development,
debugging, inspecting, ...), they got over that. They even accepted
that message parameters' types are "declared" using naming
conventions. ;-)

Access control... again, once they were introduced to the idioms, it
went better, though some of them still had a bad feeling in the
stomach. They agreed with member variables being private by default,
but they objected to all messages being public.

The image... *that* I could not fully convince them of so far. Maybe
it's my fault. If anybody has a great convincing collection of slides,
I'd love to see it. - Anyway, I have the feeling that what they
disliked most about it was that the concept of "compilation unit" or
"unit of execution" is not as definite as in, say, Java, which they
know better.

Best,

Michael