I repeat... I wonder how they are going to make back $7.5M ?

Shirley! Is that you?

> Evil people are out to get you.

Even though you know you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not watching your house.

The electrons also flow upside down.

??? I thought a speeding train has a lot of inertia and not much static friction. I don't see how the two are conflated.

You are exactly right. This is why MIT licensed Pharo Smalltalk is steadily gaining traction. Its still a small community, but vibrant. Here are a few examples... http://pharo.org/success A consortium is putting real money on the table to support paid engineering for those important tasks that sometimes don't get done with the "scratch you own itch" open source philosophy. http://consortium.pharo.org/

Where Smalltalk went wrong is charging $5000 per seat at a time that Java was being released free of charge. That may have been sustainable for those big company clients that could afford to get their foot in the door to the Smalltalk advantages, but it missed getting mind share in the mass market.

You should check the work being done on Sista "speculative in-lining smalltalk architecture" http://www.slideshare.net/esug... One interesting part of this is that it in-lines at the Smalltalk bytecode level that is stored in-Image. So you essentially get a "hot start" - no warm-up time.

Like the saying "The only languages worth learning are those that change the way you *think* about programming." After programming much the same way in Basic, Logo, Pascal, C, Prolog, Perl, PHP, Javascript, Java & Python -- Smalltalk is the language that changed the *way* I program. Its the most fun I've had programming, and now where I call home.

I doubt this article was paid for because... While its hip to be cynical and usually I might naively agree, in this case I know of the author from some Smalltalk community mail lists - and he is just an individual that is quite zealous about promoting Smalltalk. Sometimes a bit over zealous (like a reformed smoker evangelising others to quit their habit) but this article I think is reasonably well rounded. To my knowledge he's associated with open source Smalltalk flavours rather than commercial, so where would the money come from anyway?

The continuous evolution of the Image such that it lost the ability to be recreated from scratch is a failing that the Pharo guys are working hard to fix with a bootstrapping CI infrastructure... http://rmod.inria.fr/archives/...

A thread that touches on async events. http://lists.pharo.org/piperma...

It depends on which VM you were using. Slide 51 shows the Sista VM provides a magnitude improvement over the original Interpreter VM. http://www.slideshare.net/esug...

Its an old post circa 2008, but Ramon Leon's article "Simple Image Based Persistence"
http://onsmalltalk.com/simple-...
describes that "One of the nicest things about prototyping in Smalltalk is that you can delay the need to hook up a database during much of your development, and if you're lucky, possibly even forever."

and slightly updated... http://forum.world.st/ANN-Simp...

The Pharo Consortium has only been going a few years and is steadily gaining members - companies putting real money on the table. http://consortium.pharo.org/