I do think "to a fault" is subjective, but things like Prolog make a great example. Prolog is really cool and useful, but it makes anything except for the queries a real nightmare and will therefore never takeoff as a general purpose language. That's all I'm trying to say. Languages like Perl allow you to do logic programming with logic programming libraries, but also make text processing a breeze.

Take it with a grain of salt of course. Smalltalk is amazing, but the way you store code in an image isn't for s everyone.

I don't understand your last paragraph...can you please elaborate? What cute sayings are you referring to?