[stcredzero]

That said, I don't mind reinventing the wheel in new ways - every time our wheels get better and better.

Not always. Pry debugging Ruby can be pretty awesome but still often leaves a lot to be desired compared to the VisualWorks Smalltalk debugger+environment. Then there's the One Laptop Per Child project. How many developers were trying to recreate things that already existed in Smalltalk? What if they could've freed up the developer power wasted in that wheel reinvention? Seriously, a lot of the advanced state saving/rollback features would've just come for free in Smalltalk.

[coldtea]

>Not always. Pry debugging Ruby can be pretty awesome but still often leaves a lot to be desired compared to the VisualWorks Smalltalk debugger+environment. Then there's the One Laptop Per Child project. How many developers were trying to recreate things that already existed in Smalltalk?

How many Smalltalks were not closed source and with commercial IDEs and toolsets?

[stcredzero]

Squeak. That would've been enough. Smalltalk doesn't have an IDE in the traditional sense. The browser is a very small, thin app on top of the meta level and libraries.

[coldtea]

Squeak only got viable a decade or so after the demise of commercial Smalltalks.

[pjmlp]

Back in those days we just bought our tools.