I found this post on "languages that suck" interesting. There's a small issue with the metric used to find Smalltalk though. I'm not going to argue that Smalltalk is "mainstream", but it does have a bigger footprint than this site would suggest. How so?

Well, one of the metrics is the availability of code files online:

As in the first study, all data were collected from search results retrieved via Google's Code Search. For each target language, three pieces of information were initially gathered:

Total Files

An approximation of the language's footprint in Google's database (and thus its popularity). Determined by one of the following queries: lang:<language-name>, lang:"<language-name>", or file:.*\.ext where ext is the file extension of that language's source code files.

Here's the problem - Smalltalkers don't tend to share source code that way - especially in the two dialects that get a lot of attention online: Squeak and Cincom Smalltalk. For Squeak, there's a lot of stuff shared via SqueakMap, and for CST, there's the Public Store. Neither is going to show up in this kind of search. As well, Smalltalk source files don't have a standard file extension across dialects (or even a completely interchangeable source format).

Something to keep in mind.

Update: You can look at some package detail for the Public Store here (475 packages listed) and for SqueakMap here (669).

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