Ask HN: Why isn't SmallTalk more popular?

6 points by drumdance ↗ HN
I've never used SmallTalk, but I hear about it all the time as something approaching the perfect OO language. Why is it not more popular for actual production code?

3 comments

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Because it exists in its own world. You don't get to use your normal editors or command line tools to interact with it. I think that the ease of use interacting with C libraries and the command line correlates well to popularity and the popular Smalltalk implementations fail in this regard.
In my experience, I found it a very decent environment to work in. My qualms were related to its less than common syntax. If you ask me, its the same reason lisp dialects aren't more vastly used: they are very different than imperative language syntax, and therefore take more effort to learn.
Why isn't X more popular?

WHY AREN'T YOU WRITING MORE CODE IN X???

If you like a language, use the language. I like Lua, so I code in Lua.

A friend of mine really likes Objective-C, and he writes in Obj-C at all times.

Please write code, it really doesn't even matter what language, just write code.