Most of the things that make Smalltalk great (what makes Smalltalk
Smalltalk) are the things that hold it back for a lot of people.

If you want a more Unixy, scripty, Smalltalkish thing with syntax
blended C and Perl that you can hack with a text editor, try Ruby.

If you want objects all the time with a crazy amount of integration in
the tools and little attempt at conforming to outside ideas, Smalltalk
is your game.



On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Mark Volkmann <mark at ociweb.com> wrote:
> I don't have a lot of experience with Smalltalk yet, but I really love what
> I've seen so far.
>
> I'm curious what experienced Smalltalkers see as some of the reasons why it
> doesn't attract more attention. I understand the issues with Smalltalk in
> the past related to license costs and performance, but those have been
> addressed now. Have you tried to convince someone to consider Smalltalk and
> failed to convince them? Why do you think they rejected it? What
> improvements could be made to current Smalltalk environments, especially
> Squeak, that might sway them?
>
> For me the biggest issue has been trying to run my code from outside Squeak.
> This includes running Squeak headless to do something script-like and
> configuring a GUI application to run in a way that doesn't require the user
> to know they are running Squeak. Both of these are supposedly possible, but
> very difficult to get right.
>
> ---
> Mark Volkmann
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