Quoting Peter Hickman <peter / semantico.com>:

> mental / rydia.net wrote:
>
> > But Smalltalk never caught on, at least not to the degree that
> > Ruby has.

> What are you talking about. In what way has smalltalk never
> caught on?

I should never have phrased it that way.  Read it as "I think
Smalltalk never caught on to the degree that Ruby has."

Which is still a pretty sloppy and radical claim (mea culpa), but
not so inadvertantly inflammatory.

It also needs to be read in the context of the original post,
concerned with the evangelization of certain functional programming
techniques.  I didn't intend to invoke popularity contests like TPCI
or the infamous and unscientific "google test".

My thesis is that Ruby (for whatever reasons) has "caught on better"
in the sense that it's attracted a much wider spectrum of
programmers than Smalltalk.

My impression of Smalltalk programmers is that they tend come from
more "functional-literate" backgrounds, so blocks are not such a
new thing for most of them.  By contrast, I get the sense that new
Ruby programmers are represented by a much broader bell curve when
it comes to FP.

I'm guessing you've got a significant Smalltalk background (I don't,
though I'm basically literate in it) -- based on your own
experience, do you think this is accurate?

It'd be interesting to have a real, scientific, survey, but I'm not
sure how one would go about conducting one in this case.

-mental