Smalltalk never evolved towards practical. It did so much on it's own because it had to: there were no windowing graphical operating systems, so it was invented

Smalltalk never evolved towards practical. It did so much on it's own because it had to: there were no windowing graphical operating systems, so it was invented and included. There was no SCM, and so it was invented and included. There were no object oriented IDEs with object inspectors, so it was invented and included. The problem is, the first implementation of an idea is rarely the best, or the one that wins in the market. There's entire parts of our industry that just peeled off a piece invented by Smalltalk and made a better general purpose one. Great article.