On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini at gnu.org> wrote:
>
>  But it's not like Python or Ruby couldn't have an image, it's just that
> people did not implement it.  The strong point of Smalltalk is the language,
> period.

Couldn't disagree more.  The language is clean, simple and nice.  But
so is Lisp, Lisp is fact simpler and more powerful.  Still I can
develop things "from scratch" faster in Smalltalk.  Why?  Because I
can just create a class that I think is close to what I want, develop
things in the debugger, inspector and so on "watching it grow as I
go".  The "eternally running" nature of the image, and the way all
tools are created to take advantage of that puts it ahead of even Lisp
for me, because Lisp, despite being incrementally compiled, still
seems to want a separation between what the system is "on paper" and
runtime.