The Weekly Squeak

Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner, has an just published an interesting article noting the resurgence of interest in Smalltalk. He says that developers owe a tremendous debt to Smalltalk but the language itself has been relegated to a small niche of technology elites for several years now. He reasons that this was because it introduced so many new concepts that the developer community is only now coming to appreciate.

He suggests a number of catalysts for the sudden revival of Smalltalk:

• Open source Smalltalks encouraging less vendor lock-in.
• An understanding of the importance of Smalltalk to the designers of Python and Ruby.
• And of course, the excitement that Seaside has sparked.

Read the article for more details, and some very interesting comments.