I am very newbie with smalltalk, but I have some thoughts about this
question.

- Markting (someone has already say it)
- Lack of investment (someone has already say it)
- Smalltalk is simple. And, as It says a friend of mine, simplest things
doesn't sell. It might be complex. Complex things are the most sold.
- Companies needs to spend many and spent their budgets
- Databases support. Squeak for example, how can be used in many enterprise
projects if there is only driver for mysql and postgres ? and Glorp only
with postgres... We did a survey and they are just the 20% of the market (we
need support for oracle, mssql, and so on.). Because of this, we are working
in SqueakDBX.
- IDE. It has a lot of good things, but also a lot of limitations. I am very
use to use  Eclipse. And sometime to miss some features about it.
- There is no company (in squeak) behind it. Managers, owners, directors,
and so on, many times need this. They need it in order to have someone to
blame in case of problems.

cheers,

Mariano


On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto <
casimiro.barreto at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Alan Grimes escreveu:
>
>  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.
>
>
>  1. The VM, it's weak, no multithreading, few IO options.
>
> 2. The restriction to image based smalltalk instead of the ability to
> run discreet programs...
>
> Image based smalltalk is awesome but it makes it difficult to interface
> smalltalk code with external systems.
>
>
>
>  The shortcomings about the squeak VM can be easily surpassed. Same thing
> about the "image" issue.
>
> IMHO what holds Smalltalk (and squeak in particular) is lack of investment
> ($$$) in order to provide the things that "commercial users" (aka "regular
> developers/users") imagine/request as desirable (like "canonic"
> documentation, "canonic" books like "Smalltalk for dummies" (LOL) or
> "coreSmalltalk" or "Smalltalk Foundation Classes", better default options
> for the interfaces).
>
> Besides these "small things" there are some important issues: there are
> several flavors of smalltalk and they're not compatible to each other. It
> seems that in the "open/free world" squeak will take the lead and perhaps it
> is good news. Anyways, today we have only VW to be seriously considered in
> the "commercial world" (since Dolphin is not multi-platform and was "half
> abandoned" by its developers and other smalltalks are both non portable and
> little known) and squeak and VW VMs are not compatible (no instant or even
> easy port from squeak to VW).
>
> It is not possible to imagine the success of anything that is not accepted
> by the non-academic community. Currently most of the non-academic community
> in the World has little more than high-school degree, little or no fluency
> in English and earn something like US$1.000,00/month (or less) for a journey
> of at  least 40hours/week (and lots of non payed over-time). So I do think
> that the two previous paragraphs are relevant aspects to the question of"what is holding back smalltalk?"
>
>
>
>
>
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