when i was in uni in 2014 i learned that smalltalk became obsolete, later i went to industry to see that no one use smalltalk(or prolog) and yet on this site ppl bringing up smalltalk every single month, why is that i wonder
I suspect that's largely because most smalltalk implementations don't store code in git. "A smalltalk" is more like a Linux distro than a phone app. It's almost like the main purpose of a smalltalk is to build more smalltalks. It's a good way for developers to build a deep, powerful tool for other developers, but it's a less good way to build user experiences targeted at non-programmers, who are going to want to have a bunch of different apps to use not a bunch of different operating systems to use.
Good economics for the classroom; bad economics for the real world. Then and now, though, a great way to play with novel ideas in programming languages.
https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/projects/index.htm...
It's not dominant in the way of Wordpress but also not insignificant.
Systems are only truly obsolete when there is no real reason to use them. PL/1 is obsolete. It's hard to find even legacy code using it, and nobody would use it for experimentation.