Most of the things that make Smalltalk great (what makes Smalltalk Smalltalk) are the things that hold it back for a lot of people.
If you want a more Unixy, scripty, Smalltalkish thing with syntax blended C and Perl that you can hack with a text editor, try Ruby.
If you want objects all the time with a crazy amount of integration in the tools and little attempt at conforming to outside ideas, Smalltalk is your game.
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Mark Volkmann mark@ociweb.com wrote:
I don't have a lot of experience with Smalltalk yet, but I really love what I've seen so far.
I'm curious what experienced Smalltalkers see as some of the reasons why it doesn't attract more attention. I understand the issues with Smalltalk in the past related to license costs and performance, but those have been addressed now. Have you tried to convince someone to consider Smalltalk and failed to convince them? Why do you think they rejected it? What improvements could be made to current Smalltalk environments, especially Squeak, that might sway them?
For me the biggest issue has been trying to run my code from outside Squeak. This includes running Squeak headless to do something script-like and configuring a GUI application to run in a way that doesn't require the user to know they are running Squeak. Both of these are supposedly possible, but very difficult to get right.
Mark Volkmann