Interesting post on the power of Smalltalk, but with an odd entry point:

The first thing I noticed was that the Smalltalk community is still alive allthough a bit muted. The impact of Java has definately taken its' toll though. A quick search on jobserve for Smalltalk vacancies identified only 10 or so and they appeared to be for maintance work. It looks like the remaining Smalltalkers are using Smalltalk just out of interest or just for fun in their spare time. With the exception of one or two German Consultancies, most of the Smalltalk related websites were either academic, or open source related - very few businesses.

Here's a Google search for Smalltalk - The Cincom Smalltalk web page comes up 4th, and the Why Smalltalk page 3rd. Admittedly, the Squeak entry in second place might emphasize an academic orientation, but there's plenty of commercial information right there. The top entry, for Smalltalk.org, republishes content from the CST blogs, so that will lead you to plenty of good information as well.

The rest of the article is well worth reading - it's a good promo for the ease of use and power of Smalltalk:

I got to put this idea to the test the other day. Whilst playing with Squeak, my girlfriend decided to pop herself on my knee and took a look at what I was doing. I was playing with the Alice framework port (Alice.org). Alice is a3D graphical framework which allows you to create a 3D world populated by Actors. On the screen was a pink bunny rabbit wearing dark glasses and carrying a drum and a mallet. I entered a few Smalltalk expressions asking the system to 'do-it' each time, and watched my girlfriends expression as the bunny respond to my every command. She soon caught on, and started entering commands of her own: "bunny head turn." Getting bored I was about to issue "bunny destroy" when she stopped me. "No you can't do that to such a cute bunny, make it beat the drum instead". At this point she grabbed the keyboard an typed "bunny beatDrum", but the system responed with: " bunny didNotUnderStand".

That's why I include a workspace in BottomFeeder - I actually use it myself for scripting and experimenting. That kind of end application scripting has led to actual product features, and is something that is well nigh impossible in Java or C#. In applications shipped in those languages, you have a dead end - if the developer didn't consider it, you're just done. Does this mean that just anyone can start coding in the Bf workspace? No, you do need to know the APIs and class names - that's a limitation. But at least you get far enought to have the limitation :)