Alan, as much as the world may need saving, Squeak will not do it. 

The people here are brilliant scientists, some of them are responsible for
many key innovations that made present-day interactive computation and
software engineering possible. As scientists they do not care about the
preocupations of organisations that use computation as industrial
infrastructure.

The resulting creation, Squeak is thus a spectacularly effective
prototyping tool which demonstrates all the abilities of the
exceptional collection of people who create it and maintain it.
Squeak is also encumbered by extreme NIH, and as a work in progress will
predictably break the existing application codebase. Forget about
non-regression testing.

It is a privilege to be able to watch the people on this list thrash
around design ideas, and evolve their language at breakneck speed. But
acrobatic monoplanes do not an airtransport industry make :)

Edmund

On Sun, 2 Sep 2001, Ned Konz wrote:

> On Sunday 02 September 2001 04:24 pm, Alan Grimes wrote:
> 
> > Are you aware of a process called "configuration managment"?
> > For Squeak to be a viable commercial alternative (never mind the
> > performance issue), it must be clearly documented and well controlled.
> >
> > Otherwise companies cannot rely on it enough to use it...
> 
> We're taking the first steps here on the list, making a module system that 
> will help to ease the problems of distribution. Configuration management 
> would benefit greatly by such a system.
> 
> And anyway, who said that it was the goal of the entire Squeak community to 
> make Squeak a "viable commercial alternative"? Squeak isn't commercial, and 
> so far hasn't been focused on making traditional applications (not that there 
> aren't some people who want to do this, but it hasn't been the main focus).
> 
> I'd hate to see Squeak thought of as being yet another database front end 
> product, like some of the other Smalltalks are seen by some people.
> 
>