On Aug 11, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Janko Mivšek wrote:

> "Anyone who says Squeak is production ready has never used Squeak  
> in production. Recently quite a prominent member of the Squeak  
> community seriously considered moving to Java because he could not  
> get uptimes bigger than a two days. It turned out Delays and  
> Semaphores (!!!) were broken all time along. There are dozens of  
> issues like this. One example is that the settings of the GC are  
> tuned for memory sizes of about 1 MB. Don't even get me started  
> about the 1 GB and 120 MB memory issues which tend to crash the  
> image. Or the bugs in ClassBuilder, InterpreterSimulator,  
> Decompiler, .... You need to have several Squeak images per CPU  
> because there is a limit to the amount of punishment a single  
> Squeak image can take. Squeak itself is heavily forked (Squeak,  
> Croquet, Sophie, SqueakLand, SmallLand, ... ). All the code in the  
> image in unmaintained. There are teams but most of the time they  
> don't even integrate submitted fixes for bugs. Development of these  
> packages has stopped. The same situation for the VM. The only VM  
> that is maintened is the Mac VM. The Windows VM will only get new  
> builds if the maintainer needs some fixes for himself. The Unix VM  
> is unmainted. The maintainer of the main VM code publically stated  
> he will do shit unless someone pays him. Squeak is fully of ugly  
> shit code that has just been hacked in for abandoned experiments.  
> That http server Seaside uses on Squeak? Unmaintained and has bugs  
> with HTTP 1.1. That really is just a small list of issues Squeak has."

It's stated a bit harshly, but yeah, that sounds basically accurate.  
The amazing thing is that, in spite of all that, Squeak is still such  
a wonderful platform to work with. I do use Squeak in production, and  
there are very few things I would trade it for.

Colin