> 
> 
> As a certified noob to Smalltalk hailing from the Ruby, Delphi, .NET and Java worlds where RDBMs rule, I must say I'm amused how anyone can say  Smalltalk has *failed.*
> 
> I had a funny experience when doing mainly Rails development a couple years ago. I had an interview at a PHP shop, where the main technical guru there insisted that Ruby/Rails had "failed" and wanted me to tell him why. I told him, actually, there were bugs in the early ActiveRecord API that exposed Rails to scalability problems, not the framework or design concept itself. I pointed out that if Rails failed, so did Symfony, and Django, ASP.NET MVC, and countless other copy-cat frameworks in other languages/platforms. If one measure of failure is industry adoption, then there was no way Rails failed.
> 
> And where did MVC come from? Well, we know that answer. The whole discussion is pointless. Engineers sometimes get the idea that because they or a project they were on failed that happened to be using a particular tool, the tool is a failure. At bottom, this guy was bitten by Rails and so he had a kind of vendetta against it. As if PHP is the way, the truth and the light. By the way they offered me a job anyway, but I didn't take it. :)
> 
> Some tools make certain things harder or easier.  I find Smalltalk liberating as it makes it easy to decompose hard domain problems sans all the syntactic cruft of the so-called modern languages -- which, funny enough, are constantly trying to find new and more complicated ways to express what Smalltalk has always done simply: generic collections, metadata, reflection, etc. 
> 
> So, I'm going against the grain and getting into Smalltalk. I have been a bit disappointed by the state of certain libraries and the relatively small community, but I enjoy the language and feel more productive in it, so...that's what matters to me.

Thanks bob
We are trying to improve on that front, but this is a battle of every moment. Now everybody can have an impact.
Join and help us building better libraries.

Stef

http://www.pharo-project.org