Warren Postma wrote:

> But Smalltalk is far from dead, it's just in a tiny niche it needs to break
> out of.  Secret weapon my @$$. Smalltalk is a lot more than a "Pure OOP"
> langage. It's the only "Live code" environment I've ever seen. The "Pure
> OOP" is incidental to me, whereas to you, it is perhaps electrifying. I look
> at it and go "So what, big hairy deal."  So if both of us are going to use a
> single language, a little compromise is in order.

Why?  Why is it that everytime someone comes across something they like a bit of
they insist on telling everyone why we must change all the rest of it to suit
them.  This is to ''sell it to a wider audience' or 'make it more accessible'.
Then they accuse they original community of 'cliqiness' or an 'ivory tower
mentality' if they disagree (I expect I'm about to be so labeled ;-).

There is a simple solution, make your changes and post them, if they really add
something then people will use them.  Write your own language (That's where
Python, Perl and Ruby came from), with most Open Source licenses you can start
from quite a high base.  Leave smalltalk to plough its own furrow, personally I
think it will still be around when many 'non-niche' languages are only to be
found in tape archives.

Smalltalk does evolve, just very slowly.  Adding features is a dangerous game,
mostly they prove to be a pain in the butt and get taken out again.  As for the
syntax, I only really started 'getting it' recently but smalltalk syntax is the
most elegant  that I have come across, perfectly balanced on the knife edge
between tersity and expressiveness.

Rgds.

Tom

--
"It's not what you don't know that kills you, ... it's what you know that ain't
so." - Mr Thompkins