> He is talking about the ought I think he's wrong, both about the "is" and about the "ought". The reason I posted originally, way upthread, was to respond to

> He is talking about the ought I think he's wrong, both about the "is" and about the "ought". The reason I posted originally, way upthread, was to respond to OP's claim of "Smalltalk's rejection of the file-system and command-line". I don't believe it rejected either thing. It has an internal file system, as discussed, but it also had and has perfectly reasonable support for reading and writing external, traditional files. And it has various kinds of command-line, as discussed. I don't think it was anything about Smalltalk's ability to handle JPEGs or email or NFS or even text files that was the problem. I don't believe that appeasing the Unix world is (or would have been) either necessary or sufficient for Smalltalk success. I think the success of Unix is path-dependent; a historical accident. It had momentum and Smalltalk didn't. It blows my mind that people still think Unixisms are somehow some kind of universal apex of computing [†]! I suppose there are, at some level, reasons for Smalltalk's relative lack of success; and while I don't know what they are, I don't think OP gives a good one. > [Interacting via networks] turns out to be significantly more difficult than various languages interacting on the same box. I... don't believe this to be the case. At all. In theory or practice. It has certainly not been my experience. > Objective-S supports [a bunch of Unix stuff] Sure, OK. So do a million other languages. What is, to my mind, special about Smalltalk is exactly that it takes the identity between programming language runtime and operating system seriously, and tries to flip the script: what if, instead of dumbing down our languages to fit our operating systems, we raised our ambitions about what an operating system could be, to fit our languages? Smalltalk as it stands is a poor operating system, of course. You're right that it doesn't come close to covering "the functions OSes are expected to fulfil these days". It is basically a time capsule of 1978. Semi-cooperative scheduling, Monitors and Semaphores for mutexing, flat file system, insufficient internal isolation/namespacing, poorly integrated networking. If even a small fraction of the energy put into making Unix cover those functions had been put into Smalltalk... well. We'll never know unless someone puts in the time. -- [†] "... an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think [Unix is] a pretty neat idea"