Lothar Scholz <mailinglists / scriptolutions.com> wrote in message news:<7516975309.20040201203323 / scriptolutions.com>...
> 
> Smalltalk is also dying or better becaming less and less attrictive.
> Same as lisp where only Franz Lisp is still competitive in some areas.
> In fact in commerical areas Smalltalk is much more dead then Eiffel.

Those of us (and there are quite a few) who use Smalltalk for
commercial development daily find such statements very amusing.  As a
simple data point, there are currently at least five commercial
Smalltalk vendors (IBM, Cincom, Object Arts, Gemstone, Exept).  That's
an awful lot of companies to be selling a dead language - I wonder how
they support all those development teams if nobody is buying their
product?

Ruby is not going to die just because it's not #1 most popular
scripting language, any more than Apple is going to die because they
only have a couple of % of the PC market.  Network effects matter, but
Ruby is well beyond the critical mass it needs to survive.  In fact,
Ruby is now too popular for my personal taste - I prefer the energy in
slightly smaller communities than Ruby's has become.  The price of
success...

Avi