Agreed. Cincom Smalltalk (ParcPlace's VisualWorks) is certainly not dead. Its a powerful system and keeps getting updates. Gemstone Smalltalk: there is nothi

Agreed. Cincom Smalltalk (ParcPlace's VisualWorks) is certainly not dead. Its a powerful system and keeps getting updates. Gemstone Smalltalk: there is nothing that competes with this unique approach to DB and code execution in a somewhat seamless server cluster. My guess is that after a 10-15 year lull, Smalltalk is growing a bit. I'm very happy to see Pharo chugging along. I think that by 2014, Pharo 3.0 will be a hit. Pharo 2.0 is already very compelling for many use cases. Smalltalk didn't really die. It was the Smalltalk vendors that died. There were three++ viable Smalltalk vendors when Java came along. Java did not have a tech advantage. Not even close. Java was crammed through the industry by big players that didn't own Smalltalk implementations and Sun was in a position to give Java away for free. At that time the Smalltalk vendors had old-school business models whose investors did not allow them to turn the corner at the dawn of the Internet age of the mid-90s. Had either Digitalk or ParcPlace given a free license to embed Smalltalk into Netscape's browser instead of Netscape/Sun pulling the Java applet and Javascript move, we would all be writing browser apps in a clean consistent language, instead of Javascript. This is not speculation. I was in the room when such an opportunity was discussed. It was soon dismissed as "our board won't allow it as it would destroy our current business model".