[fu86]

I've analyzed the codebase a couple of years ago (see https://aaron-mueller.de/projekte/lively and http://data.datenhalter.de/lively_analyse_morph.pdf in german). It's basically a proof of concept to bring Squeak to the web. It was a hype back in 2007 because Dan Ingalls pushed this as a research project by SUN.

The whole codebase is a mess and so damn slow that this is not usable at all (see https://aaron-mueller.de/blog/bestof-lively). The architecture however is pretty smart, but most of it are stolen from Squeak. So the projekt itself is not much more than a bad port of Squeak in spathetti JavaScript.

[joshmarinacci]

This was done a decade ago to prove what was possible with web tech of the time. Clearly the web of today proves they were right.

[mattbasta]

I think you're forgetting how good the web was ten years ago.