[Newbies] Newbie assortment

[David Mitchell]

>  > is it alive?
Yes, but with a much smaller community than Ruby/Rails.

>  >2) Can Squeak be used as the engine in enterprise with and without Seaside?
Depends on the enterprise. VisualWorks has more databases and
connectivity support. But Ramon Leon has blogged about working with
Windows in the enterprise. I've deployed the old pluggable web server
stuff in enterprises back in the late 90s to run wikis on NT. Think I
made it a service, but not headless. Know headless is possible.

>  >3) Is the community small? Big? Growing? Shrinking rapidly?
The community is small but has some incredible minds. Seaside has
helped growth. I get the pulse of the community through email lists,
watching IRC logs (never seem to get on live), subscribing to Squeak
related feeds (like Ramon's blog and James Robertson's blog which has
a lot of VW stuff, also covers Squeak <-- the larger Smalltalk
community seems to participate in Squeak as well).

>  >4) Is there any push or drive to making Squeak more mainstream.
Randal is probably doing the most visible work here:
http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/library/posts/page/1/

But Squeak by Example publication and the forthcoming Lulu book on
Seaside are amazing as well.