Good evening Roy. One thing that always amazes me a lot is that so many experienced solution providers (ie. people who develop solutions either to be sold as OTSCS or embedded as a more or less autonomous part of a bigger system) mind about if something is "mainstream" or something else.
For several reasons extensively discussed in this forum, smalltalk didn't "hit the market" like java did. It has nothing to do regarding to smalltalk qualities or lack of them. It has to do with good marketing vs. bad marketing, shorter learning curve for things like java and the fact that java was more apt to be used in personal computers of the 1990ies. Besides that, large part of smalltalk community at that time had the "king inside their bellies" and that just made the technology less attractive to outsiders (look: 1990ies language wars). Smalltalk is a really nice technology supporting fast development of complex (and performative) solutions and demanding much smaller teams to do so. It has evident advantages in the fields of code testing, profiling, maintenance and reuse. Most common families of smalltalk like pharo/squeak/Cincom VW/ are cross platform (Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS). Important families of smalltalk are open source (pharo, squeak, gnu smalltalk and dedicated derivatives like OpenCobalt). Smalltak is far from dead. If you investigate you'll see that pharo (for instance) is supported by important universities (listed among 100 best universities in world). In recent years we have witnessed amazing things in smalltalk world. For reasons that can be summarized as immature product adoption in the 1990ies and ugly commercial practices by suppliers, smalltalk is not as popular as java or python. IMHO time will correct this situation. Now, if you want to deploy solutions you have no reason to fear smalltalk except by the fact that it's highly addictive: you start producing and do it fast and clean and just don't want to stop... but, like any d-dealer would say: "don't trust me, you just have to try it... just once... and look: first time is for free !!!" Ok, enough kidding: if you want to deploy solutions you'll see that for the same investment (time & material resources) you do more with smalltalk. You'll loose much less time debugging things, documenting things, figuring out what other people did before... you'll spend much less money in debuggers, profilers, testers, etc... You'll see that reusing and integrating things is just pleasant. And you'll be amazed by performance. That are my 2¢ CdAB
