> But the most compelling reason for me is to do with the system's  
> architecture.  The Smalltalk system should be architected as an  
> onion, each layer of the onion being composed of a set of components  
> (like techtonic plates).  If it is architected like this, with  
> components at the centre not using anything in outer layers (*) then  
> removing components becomes much easier. So the normal mode of  
> development is to develop an application in a large well-facilitated  
> development image.  Once developed the programmer clones the image  
> and unloads the components they think they don't need and tests the  
> resulting application.  That differs from the current strippng  
> approach in that one is removing coarse-grained components with well- 
> understood functionalities and boundaries instead of trying to infer  
> the subset of code still used by the system.  So starting from a  
> system that is built from the ground up should enable Squeak to  
> evolve into a properly modular system.

Yes we need a nice bootstrappable onion