About the licensing subthread - you guys must be new here. We only have
license flamewars in April and October of each year ;-)

While I understand Randal's point, I do agree that worries about "clean
room" are a bit too much. A friend of mine was sued by IBM over the BIOS
in the original PC so I tracked that and the Compaq case much more
closely than most here. This was an extreme case and not at all typical
of other software and even then a full clean room scheme turned out not
to be needed. But people still keep pointing out Compaq's method as the
right way to do things:

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html (see Rod Canion's interview about
2/3 down that page)

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Well, other Smalltalks are more modular, so we can safely conclude  
> that that is not what's holding back Smalltalk.
> 
> (but I do agree we should strive for modularity in Squeak of course)

In fact, we can generalize this and of nearly all objections that were
pointed out there is some Smalltalk to which it doesn't apply. Now it
might be that only a perfect Smalltalk to which none of the objections
apply could have succeeded, but I think what we have here is a case of

http://www.dreamsongs.org/WorseIsBetter.html

Smalltalk had higher upfront costs than the alternatives, but scaled
much better. When I pointed out Self (Sun's own version of Smalltalk) to
people in the mid 1990s they would reply "but you need a 24MB Sun
machine to run that! Practically all deployed workstations only have 8MB
and Java works just fine there." I would claim that this was only
because Java wasn't doing anything yet (animating a funny little man)
and that by the time it did half of what Self did it would be twice as
large. It turned out that I was actually generous to Java, but when my
prediction came true typical PCs had 256MB each.

But to understand what happened to Smalltalk you must look at the
history more than at technical aspects. I don't know a good text I can
link to, but Eliot spent some time on this in his AoSTA talk -

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8988857822906068209

-- Jecel