First, let's give credit where credit is due. There is plenty to go around...

Doug Engelbart coined the term "computer augmentation"; the idea to use 
computers to augment the human brain rather than replace it. Doug was also 
the first to split the screen into windows. The first mouse papent is in 
his name. He has conceived the Bootstrap Institute to further his lifelong 
goal of boosting individual and organizational ability to better address 
problems that are complex and urgent... See www.bootstrap.org

There is a great deal of credit left to Alan Kay and the Xerox PARC 
community. Personal computers, overlapping windows, the holy grail of the 
"Dynabook"...

To me, the most significant Smalltalk innovation is the notion of a stored 
program object computer, making relection a first class citizen in its 
programming universe. I started my professional career programming stored 
program binary computers, coding in binary and assembly. I used reflective 
programming extensively and with great success, but lost this capability 
when I migrated to FORTRAN and only regained it more then 10 years later 
with Smalltalk. People talk about the "Smalltalk programming language", but 
this language is merely a feature of its class library. It can be augmented 
with other, higher level languages without breaking the image. Great and 
rewarding fun!

This brings up what I believe is the greatest stumbling block that meets 
Squeak novices: The class library. Squeak shares this problem with all 
other programming languages, see this eloquent article by Dave Thomas: "The 
Deplorable State of Class Libraries", in Journal of Object Technology
http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2002_05/column2.
A group of dedicated people are busy cleaning up the Squeak library. (Stef, 
Marcus, ...) This is very hard and sometimes very unrewarding work. But 
keep it up -- it is extremely important.

I see Squeak as a wonderful laboratory where hundreds of professional and 
amateur researchers can explore, share and test new ideas. My nightmare is 
that it should become a mainstream professional IDE prematurely. The need 
for "backward compatibility" could then be overwhelming, effectively 
hindering innovation. Send the application developers to Dolphin for the 
time being and permit the next Squeak version be incomatible with the last.

Cheers
--Trygve

-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
Norway