Let's call this the familiarity theory of value. To be sure, familiarity plays a large part; but I think there are other significant factors beyond this. Like

Let's call this the familiarity theory of value. To be sure, familiarity plays a large part; but I think there are other significant factors beyond this. Like I mentioned, having an FFI (ironically, I first learned of that term from Lisp) to leverage pre-existing codebases is huge; being able to grep/diff/git is huge. I got back into Smalltalk through "Refactoring" and admired its elegance, liked how it was different - except for the images. In the meantime, persistence has been implemented in other languages, OS's and even IDE's, some implementations being more flexible while keeping the "everything is a file" concept. I'll tell you one thing that keeps me hopeful and not completely giving up on Smalltalk is that with GNU Smalltalk, I can treat Smalltalk programs as scripts. For someone who does rapid iterative development by scripting in C/C++ (http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/binfmtc.html.en http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/binfmtc.html.en) being able to just type some code in and run it appeals to me. No images, no virtual machines, no (explicit) compilation, just type, save and run.