Casimiro,

just a quick comment on

> One fact about smalltalk is that it was plagued by fragmentation.

Though that is very true, it was typical of the time in which it was
created. Fortran and Cobol were the old languages that resisted
fragmentation the most, but even they had too much variation by today's
standards. If you look at Lisp, Forth, Pascal, APL and so on you will
see that Smalltalk was pretty uniform in comparison, mostly due to the
Blue Book being a reference even for people (like me) who did their own
Smalltalks from scratch.

With the Internet and Free Software in the 1990s we get one
implementation languages like Ruby, Lua, Tcl, Io and others. Even more
fragmented stuff like Python, Javascript and Java are more uniform that
Fortran and Cobol were.

It is a pity that the idea of making Smalltalk-80 a standard by
separating the image from the virtual machine didn't pan out because it
wasn't clear to interested people how to get the stuff from Xerox. From
what one person told me decades later, it wasn't free (except for Apple,
DEC, Tektronix, HP and Berkeley) but it was very affordable.

-- Jecel