Smalltalk is the second most loved programming language, according to the 2017 StackOverflow survey. (Rust is most loved.) If any language deserves a second chance, it's Smalltalk.
Thus, there's no reason why Smalltalk can't be widely adopted, whether it's in the enterprise or elsewhere (teaching, hobbyist, research, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT, virtual reality, etc.).
It's too bad this targeted a language that's actually useful, as opposed to something like brainfuck. For me the joke fell flat because of it. I would've loved to see this kind of investment – alas, such are the follies of this day.
No the author Richard Eng has been doing a ton of short marketing blog posts trying to get more attention for the language and appears to have an April Fool's sense of humor. He's also been talking about Go a lot which is very different than Smalltalk in all but the simplicity aspect.
What's so bad about Dart, if you disregard the "Google is trying to subvert the web" angst from people who have invested heavily in the javascript world? I quite like the optional typing in the language, for instance.
I just wish there was more serverside-development happening in Dart - it seems 95% client-side focused at the moment (dart2js and flutter).
>What's so bad about Dart, if you disregard the "Google is trying to subvert the web" angst? I quite like the optional typing in the language, for instance.
A new language that doesn't solve anything better than Smalltalk did.
It does provide the feature of optional typing, as I just said. I spent my formative years developing in a language with optional typing and really grew to like it. I think it's a great concept that has missed the mainstream somehow.
Besides from that the syntax is completely different, being inherited from C.
Dart is moving away from optional typing towards static typing with inference. (It's useful for ahead-of-time compilation.) Take a look at strong mode. But since you can leave out the types in simple situations, it often looks the same.
(But meh, it's not really innovative/new as this page says, just not popular.)
Basically, it's a language that allows you to choose the level of type checking. You can be super strict all the time, or only when it matters. Or not at all.
Like all other modern languages it naturally has the basic collection data types built in so that you don't have to reinvent them.
Dart is just a Java-clone by some of the same people and hasn't really incorporated any lessons from 20 years of Java. For example, their answer to Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake is... "The Elvis operator"
The Fourth Generation Languages where supposed to take over from the Third Generation Languages (C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL etc.) for higher level work (like business computing)
Many have been successful within niches, but Java was a brand new 3GL at a time when a lot of industry focus was on 4GLs.
I think sun had mindshare because they understood the nascent internet much better. From my perspective it was the first time I had seen a marketing effort of that scale behind a programming language.
Sun also supported SunSITE which was pretty much the best place to find FOSS at the time
Thus, there's no reason why Smalltalk can't be widely adopted, whether it's in the enterprise or elsewhere (teaching, hobbyist, research, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT, virtual reality, etc.).
Teaching: https://medium.com/p/an-open-letter-to-all-universities-ad98...
Machine learning: https://biosmalltalk.github.io/web/
IoT: https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/pharo-pi-9eef257b6a21
Virtual reality: http://www.opencobalt.net and http://www.3dicc.com