> > 7)     Ultimately, is there a future of Squeak in the market?

Consider Paul Graham's take on using LISP to develop what became Yahoo! 
Stores. The fact that nobody much else was using LISP in the marketplace 
meant that he had, in his own view, a competitive advantage, as his small 
team of skilled LISP hackers could do things his competitors' large teams of 
C coders couldn't (or at least not as fast).

If you think that Squeak/Smalltalk can beat C#/Java for expressiveness - which 
means amongst other things speed of development, and the ability to do 
reasonably complex things without getting bogged down in unreasonably complex 
implementation details - then you might consider Squeak/Smalltalk as a source 
of competitive advantage: maybe it can be the tool you use to carve out a 
viable niche in the midst of a lot of people using similar technologies to do 
similar kinds of things.

Funnily enough they were discussing a similar question on the Haskell list 
recently - about whether you could build a "production-grade" web server in 
Haskell (this being proposed as a test of Haskell's suitability for 
commercial - read "non-academic" - deployment). Of course you can. MS 
Research has even proposed something called Haskell Server Pages...

Dominic