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I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use. Many of the ideas developed for Smalltalk are now commonplace, so I'm guessing that it's the careful integration of those ideas that makes it special.

It is my favorite language, btw. :)

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> I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use.

It probably is because of the minimal use (and I believe #1, Rust, is also there because it's still not that common). Their "loved" metric is number of people who are using a language and would not like to switch to a different one. I suppose that the only people who use it are people who love it so much that they can ignore issues caused by lack of popularity (small number of libraries and tools, problems with OS support, etc.).

Probably because it (still) pays so well? [1]

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-salary-a...

I saw that too and wondered if it wasn't an artifact of history - when I think of smalltalk I think of peter norvig and people of his stature. Maybe the high smalltalk developer salary means it's probably used by older and very experienced developers.

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