Hello Michael,

Smalltalk has not yet "missed the boat" because, they're all still tied to the
dock.

Granted the job of "selling" Smalltalk to developers and project managers was
definitely NOT helped by the ParcPlace/Digitalk/Object[expletive deleted]
merger/acquisition/nervous dentist investors/divestitures/CinCom acquisitions
for a song debacle.

But Smalltalk is not dying anymore than the Macintosh because there's too much
ground swell support, market mass and sheer cussedness by people willing to
slip one by their bosses.

As for Tcl/Tk, it has its uses just like COBOL and Fortran do. I can't knock
it any more than Perl. But I wouldn't write an accounting system in Perl any
more than I'd write an expert system in Tcl/Tk. And where does Smalltalk fit
into all this?

The projects that I've seen that were successful use it as the great glue that
binds everything together. As long as that's what you need, you can achieve
results faster and better in Smalltalk than in anything else and that's what I
see as its niche market.

Its a BIG niche with the internet, the web, client-server middleware, ODBL,
relational and object databases.

Thta's where the 'selling' has to succeed...

-Charles-A.

Michael Chean wrote:

> My experience also parallels Jerome's.  Because of my inexperience I am not
> a very strong advocate for Smalltalk, but just the task of convincing my
> engineer friends to look outside their comfort zone has proven impossible.
> My friend at JPL considers Smalltalk as having missed the boat, which seems
> to be the case.  When I mentioned that I was following this list he
> suggested I look at Tcl/Tk instead.