Gary McGovern <gary.play at btopenworld.com> is widely believed to have written:

> Hello,
> I'm curious to know if there are any plans to change Squeak 
> over to Java ? And if it would be possible ?
Goodness me, why on earth would one want to do such a thing? For a
start, Squeak is, after all, a language and there is a bit of a problem
in mutating a language into another and remaining the same thing. If I
assume you mean rather that you are interested in the possibility
of implementing all those nice things that Squeak-the-environment has in
java instead, well, I don't think one actually could do it well enough
to make it worth the effort. However, people have done Smalltalk-like
environments even for daft languages like Pascal way back in the olden
days (some OOPSLA paper from about 86 comes to mind) so I may be wrong.

> 
> Personally I prefer Smalltalk and its benefits such as 
> workspaces, browsers, dynamic compilation etc (I don't like to 
> use get and set and some of the huge method headers) but I'm 
> thinking from the support angle. What could have been done 
> with the huge developer base.
The problem with this suggestion is that most people who we would count
as being in this huge developer base are not at all skilled object
programmers. They seem rather to be mainly people that think that C
syntax is good, that developing by writing text files in Emacs ( or vi,
or edlin or whatever windows offers) and compiling them in tediously
static chunks is the right thing and that have no comprehension of
history, reflection or many other of the finer things in life. I'll bet
most of them think Benny Hill is funny. 

Dear oh dear, whatever next? A suggestion to use BASIC syntax?

Nice try Gary, but we all know you're just having us on. :-) You're too
smart to really mean it.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Variables won't; constants aren't.  - Osborn