"And yet, today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over drinks, the question is debated: Why?"

"And yet, today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over drinks, the question is debated: Why?" "...Interaction with the outside world." This. So. Much. This. I was a (junior) member of the team that made (part of) the prototype for the OS/2 Workplace shell, in (IIRC) Digitalk Smalltalk. Doing anything outside the Smalltalk image was incredibly painful. Want to share your work with the team? File it out (and make sure you get all of it) and give the file to the Keeper of the Golden Image, who will file it in to the image. Then pass the image around. Want to send the prototype to someone who didn't have a license for a (rather useless) support library from the trainers who taught the team Smalltalk? File our code out, file it into a virgin image, run through the test suite to make sure you had everything, reimplementing anything that used that library. Shouldn't take you more than a couple of days. Did I mention this was a prototype of a GUI? Make those FFI calls using the really sketchy api. When I started, there was a bug that would randomly cause the prototype to crash. No one could ever figure out what caused it, beyond the FFI interface. At some point, it escaped the prototype and would cause the image to crash without running the prototype. Sure, Strongtalk and Newspeak may have improved some or all of everything, but by that point the bridge had been burned. Their one opportunity had been wasted. I never saw or heard of either in the wild. "The Smalltalk image provided a much better Docker than Docker." And then there's that kind of thing.