Tim -

> Is Smalltalk slower than C for array processing of big lists of
> homogeneous data? Yup. Is it too slow to do fascinating things? Take a
> look at Croquet and decide.

It always annoys me when people do this, e.g., confuse the language with the 
system. That Croquet has been written using the Smalltalk language means 
nothing whatsoever. It might as well have been written in JavaScript, 
Python, Ruby  (or Logo for god's sake ;-) for all which we now have Parsers. 
None of which would make much of a difference.

What we _have_ been doing and what does matter is that we have been using 
Squeak as a system with all that implies - starting from being able to use 
BitBlt for image processing, the mp3 plugin for sound and video up to being 
able to run Morphic right inside a Croquet texture. We would NOT have been 
able to do this with VisualWorks, Dolphin, GST or any other "Smalltalk" 
implementation.

For all of this "Smalltalk" is totally meaningless - it just happens to have 
been the programming language of choice for people who did the important 
part: Make it accessible for us in Squeak. It is Squeak which matters, plain 
and simple. We could have done without Smalltalk but we couldn't have done 
without Squeak.

Cheers,
  - Andreas