I've only been using Squeak a very short time (for robot main program)
and would like to continue, however a rather serious limitation for
robotics is computer vision and numerical methods used for things like
Kalman and particle filters.  Python, for example, has PIL (Python
Imaging Library), numPy (numerical methods) and sciPy (scientific
methods), among others.

http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
http://www.scipy.org/
http://numpy.scipy.org/

These libraries greatly enhance Python for use in technology fields.

I'm too much a novice to venture any opinions on how this point of
distinction should or could be considered by the Smalltalk community,
but it's definitely something that will affect me personally and must
similarly affect others working on robots, electronic instruments,
scientific experiments and so forth.  

- Robert

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 16:45 -0600, David Zmick wrote:
> I have been wondering how to make smalltalk a more "popular" language,
> because i think it is excellent, and i think it would be good to try
> to get other people to use it, because, i don't notice to many younger
> programmers, like myself, using smalltalk, though, i may be wrong.
> One of the first thing i would think of to promote smalltalk would be
> writing programs in smalltalk instead of just making smalltalk better,
> i am not trying to discourage improvement on smalltalk, but if all you
> are developing is a language for people to continue to develop a
> language in, it seems like a waste of time.  The only program I know
> about, as in big, large scale programs, written in smalltalk is
> PetroVR, i may be wrong there to, but i see smalltalk as an excellent
> development environment and language, but, nothing big is written in
> it, and it will never grow if the community is focused entirely on
> making smalltalk better.  I might be completely wrong, but that is
> what i have seen, but, i have only really payed attention for a couple
> of months, and i think it would be good to see some growth in
> smalltalk's popularity. :)