Hi Stefan,
I think that you are right. But imagine what would be any Smalltalk where a company would throw away the amount of money that is currently been put in Eclipse. If they would not have something this would be really a problem. But wait soon Eclipse will just look pale compared to .Net environment. (the fun aspect of it is that people will just have another chance to get radical against .Net so for Sun).
Now I often think about pyramids. You take hordes of slaves, kill a lot of them and repeat you get your pyramids. Now this is a bit the same with programming languages even with smart slaves. I'm always fascinated that 5 guys working in a distributed setting with crazy deadlines and apparently complete lack of understanding from disney and strange goals (imagine kid programming) could make Squeak (with all the parts we hate all).
So I dream about a Smalltalk where a lot of money would be put in....
I can tell you that in our spare time (mainly the night roel and I are building a browser that would for example avoid all the popping of windows) with a simple (trivial) type inferencer we could have easy method completion. And a real powerful environment. It works now on VW7 and we are waiting for the cleaning Andreas is doing in the dark of morphic to port it.
Another Stef but with ph :)
Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse@iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/ "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes