[igouy]

>> Robert C. Martin: Smalltalk was also an image based language. Very few programmers have ever wrapped their minds around what that really meant. So, unfortunately, the language languished compared to all the text-file based languages. <<

Where is the evidence?

Back in the 1990's IBM taught many of their consultants Smalltalk, and researched what made learning Smalltalk difficult —

Smalltalk, although recognized as a good platform for rapid prototyping and software reuse, is widely regarded as difficult to learn. Unlike learning a procedural language like Pascal or C, learning Smalltalk is dominated by browsing and code comprehension. Learners of Smalltalk typically experience a long, slow start-up phase in which they become familiar with the class hierarchy and object-oriented computational model but do little meaningful work (our colleague Dave Smith calls this "climbing the Smalltalk mountain").

Programmers having to wrap their minds around the class hierarchy and OO was seen to be the problem.