Quoting Giovanni Corriga <giovanni at corriga.net>:

> Il giorno ven, 09/02/2007 alle 20.37 -0600, Eugene Wallingford ha
> scritto:
> > > >I seem to recall that the author has declared that he took Smalltalk as
> > > >inspiration in creating BlueJ ;)
> > > 
> > > That's cool. Cool and sad. :-)
> > 
> >      He did.  He was looking for a way to teach objects to
> >      novices, and he considered but dismissed Smalltalk.
> >      The reasons were part linguistic, part cultural, and
> >      part practical.  (If you are interested I can find a
> >      pointer a paper he wrote explaining the search,
> >      given at SIGCSE.)
> 
> Please do. Addressing his concerns would be good for both the devel team
> (for the practical ones) and the pr team (for the linguistics and
> cultural ones).
> 
> 	Giovanni
> 
> 
> 
Hi-

This might be the paper: <http://www.bluej.org/papers/1996-03-environment-
paper.pdf>  but see <http://www.bluej.org/about/papers.html> for a list of 
papers.  

On page 2 of the above paper, he complains that Smalltalk lacks object-oriented 
visualization machanisms, and lacks strong typing, which he claims "makes 
impossible the provision of modelling support ... and seems to indicate that 
statically typed languages can provide better support for large scale 
development of large scale software." !

So, not sure it is really a lack in Smalltalk, but perhaps a failure of 
understanding.  

David