About the licensing subthread - you guys must be new here. We only have license flamewars in April and October of each year ;-)
While I understand Randal's point, I do agree that worries about "clean room" are a bit too much. A friend of mine was sued by IBM over the BIOS in the original PC so I tracked that and the Compaq case much more closely than most here. This was an extreme case and not at all typical of other software and even then a full clean room scheme turned out not to be needed. But people still keep pointing out Compaq's method as the right way to do things:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html (see Rod Canion's interview about 2/3 down that page)
Bert Freudenberg wrote:
Well, other Smalltalks are more modular, so we can safely conclude that that is not what's holding back Smalltalk.
(but I do agree we should strive for modularity in Squeak of course)
In fact, we can generalize this and of nearly all objections that were pointed out there is some Smalltalk to which it doesn't apply. Now it might be that only a perfect Smalltalk to which none of the objections apply could have succeeded, but I think what we have here is a case of
http://www.dreamsongs.org/WorseIsBetter.html
Smalltalk had higher upfront costs than the alternatives, but scaled much better. When I pointed out Self (Sun's own version of Smalltalk) to people in the mid 1990s they would reply "but you need a 24MB Sun machine to run that! Practically all deployed workstations only have 8MB and Java works just fine there." I would claim that this was only because Java wasn't doing anything yet (animating a funny little man) and that by the time it did half of what Self did it would be twice as large. It turned out that I was actually generous to Java, but when my prediction came true typical PCs had 256MB each.
But to understand what happened to Smalltalk you must look at the history more than at technical aspects. I don't know a good text I can link to, but Eliot spent some time on this in his AoSTA talk -
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8988857822906068209
-- Jecel