Followup comments lump Smalltalk, Scheme and Lisp together and bash them all

I don't know where you get "bashing" from. I know that Smalltalk (and Lisp) are powerful languages. Heck, some folks have talked about reimplementing Ruby in Smalltalk. The followup comments that I read were hardly "bashing".

As for the choice quote, which is mine, I was merely pointing out that Perl is far easier than Smalltalk or Lisp for most people.

Speaking as one of the "bashers", maybe I wasn't clear in what I wrote, but I didn't mean it as bashing -- I actually enjoy programming in Lisp (Scheme and Smalltalk, less so). My point was that, for better or worse, Lisp and Smalltalk were developed in the programming language monocultures of the Lisp machine and (maybe) the Alto at PARC. In such a situation, there's no reason to develop convenient facilities for interacting with programs written in other languages, with idiosyncratic text output (DSSP, anyone?), etc. As it turned out, the ability to interface with other languages ended up being very important to language adoption, along with marketing and other economic accidents I won't try to unpack.

I'm tempted to go hunt down a retaliatory "choice quote", but it's probably better not to...

*Curtis Poe asks, "Why not Smalltalk?" in the sense of, "If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"*

Actually, I did not mean that in the "how come you ain't rich" sense. (At least, I generally take that question to be a type of put-down.) I was asking that question because I honestly wanted to hear what people have to say. The reasons why people do and do not make certain choices can have a huge impact on what choices one should offer. Thus, I want to understand why people have made the choices they have so that when I wind up pitching something, I know where to throw the ball.

Curtis,

Sure.

I don't understand your second paragraph, though. Would you mind elucidating? (Learnt that word from Eliza. ;-)

*I don't understand your second paragraph, though. Would you mind elucidating?*

Basically, I've been very interested in the reasons why Perl has appeared to hit a wall in terms of it's acceptance. There are plenty of large companies that are dependent on Perl for enterprise-class applications but this seems not to be widely known outside of the Perl community.

By better understanding what hampers Smalltalk's acceptance, I might better understand language choices programmers make. There's a mailing list that I'm on where we discuss such issues (specifically vis-a-vis Perl) and while I've a fair idea what holds us back (the Perl community is often its own worst enemy), I am always searching for more insight.