I take a different perspective on Squeak.  Your critique of Squeak is 
contrasting it with different Smalltalks for the purpose of writing 
application programs.  While it could be used for that, I don't think 
that that's its greatest strength.

Squeak is for creating Dynabooks -- personal dynamic media.  The idea 
is to make it easy to create and experience computational media, in 
all the myriad forms it currently takes and will take in the future. 
No other Smalltalk (or Scheme) comes close to going after that goal. 
In that sense, a better comparison might be between Squeak and 
Director.

Director is clearly the predominant package for creating multimedia 
content.  (It seems like every CD my kids have bought in the last 
three years was done in Director.)  Let's contrast Director and 
Squeak:
- Director supports lots of media formats (Flash, JPEG, GIF, WAV, 
AIFF).  Squeak supports more (e.g., VRML, MIDI).
- Director is an awful programming space -- bad programming tools, no 
ability to create abstractions.  Squeak is fabulous as a programming 
space.
- Director is Mac and Windows only. Squeak is cross-platform 
including smaller and larger systems.
- Director makes it easy to compose new media.  Squeak's composition 
tools are there, but aren't as powerful yet.
- Director is easy for non-programmers to use.  Squeak has 
Viewers/etoys, and it's getting better.
- Director is proprietary, and releases come occasionally.  Squeak is 
open source with lots of people building things and new releases 
coming out very often.
- Squeak is magnitudes faster than Director.

If I were Macromedia, I'd be more than a bit worried...

Mark
--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html