Not sure why I missed Ramon's email, but I will respond to both below.

>From: Avi Bryant <avi.bryant at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: Info on Smalltalk DSLs or Metaprogramming...
>Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 15:21:41 -0700
>
>
>On Sep 6, 2006, at 3:14 PM, Ramon Leon wrote:
>
>>I prefer to be an optimist, I've been studying and learning  Smalltalk for
>>about 3 years now, and I've seen nothing but growth in the  community. I 
>>have
>>no reason to fear that will change.
>>

M.C. Hammer was an optimist too, he had been sucessful for a few years,
and he had seen nothing but growth in his bank account.  He had no reason
to fear that it would change.  But it did.

>>Not likely, if it were so easy to do, Smalltalk wouldn't have been  chosen 
>>as
>>the implementation language.  I believe Ruby was Avi's initial  choice, 
>>but
>>he ran into problems with it's continuations (I could be wrong).

I didn't say it was going to be easy to do.  But it can and will be done.  
It's
being worked on right now.

>I wrote something about that history here:
>http://smallthought.com/avi/?p=4
>
>Seaside itself could probably be duplicated on another platform  
>(especially on Ruby), but then, you wouldn't have Smalltalk - and to  a 
>large degree I see Seaside as a (good) way to write web  applications in 
>Smalltalk, not Smalltalk as a way to support Seaside.
>
>Avi

Thanks for that Avi.

I think Ramon is overlooking the general populations dislike of change.  
When ever
someone sees seaside, and gets what is really cool about it, the first thing 
99% of them
will do is look to see if something like that exists (or is being worked on) 
in their favorite
language.  If it is, most of them wont look any further.

I'm an optimist too, when my bases are covered.  But if major bases are 
*not* covered
then any cofidence in sucess is not optimism.  It's naiveness.