Hi Yoel,

FWIW among other things I have implemented a live wire sports news to web
interface using Squeak 2.4 (took me 2 days,  news coming via a dedicated
line and a slow modem in an obscure, ascii text form) and this worked
continuously (even while I was tinkering with the code) without problems or
crashes for about 3 months producing or updating about 3000 to 10000 web
pages per day, each page being created as soon as a news reported on the
wire. This was working side by side with a web server serving the generated
html files for tester-bots which were hitting the web server quite a lot.
(...then the customer went bust with the dot.com crash before the system
could go live!)

You might also want to download and have a look at the first 2 Squeak News
issues if you haven't already done so.
http://www.squeaknews.com/download/
They are by themselves Squeak applications. Various issues have so far been
reported to be happily running under Windows, MacOS, Linux, OS/2 and
FreeBSD. At this moment they are simple in concept, more or less Multi-media
presentations. (I still would like to see someone to recreate a comparable
e-zine using Director, Java, or say, Python where examples come to life and
where screenshot looking things are actual working windows embedded into
documents, which all expressions in them are executable ;) ) We are working
on creating something like what Craig did in Stanford, only long distance,
an on-line e-zine that subscribers can interact over the net using Nebraska
or in a similar fashion which would be resource intensive.

>     3. Squeak is 'marketed' and therefore progress as an idea
> exploration tool. I usually explore my idea with the implementation
> tool. Python do both for me.

As you can see from my activities I don't see Squeak as a "just play around"
tool. There may be cases other tools may be better suited and more feasible
for some applications (IMBO not many) but I can see Squeak maturing quite
quickly to be a very serious contender in the development area pretty soon,
especially after some enhancements (i.e. Flow, modules, better font support)
are integrated.

BTW I think Squeak's distance from the OS is a design choice, not a
limitation. You can get as close to the metal as you like using various
means including FFI or plug-ins. We have experimented with PCI boards and
FPGAs with Squeak to do some really crazy things and I never felt that
Squeak was between us and the board.

Cheers,

Tansel

Tansel Ersavas
Squeak News
http://www.squeaknews.com