> Unfortunately, Smalltalk arrived to too much hype before it's (potential) time, and was crippled as production language by it's image based development and deployment methodology.

I was exposed to image based through Pharo, and I've found the idea to be awesome, as it allows very tight feedback loops on development. I see people complaining because it was nontrivial to extricate a finished program from the environment and ship it to customers in a "tamper-proof" opaque form. What puzzles me is why didn't Smalltalk play a bigger role on the ascension of free and open source software, given what was a bug for proprietary shops (hard to ship a opaque binary) is actually a feature for copyleft development (fully inspectable source code together with full development environment included by default). The GNU-Smalltalk development appears to be mostly stale. The torch of free smalltalk is carried most by Squeak and Pharo today.