I feel like a lot of the really clever and elegant things about smalltalk as a language and an object model got bogged down in the program image execution model, to the point where it stunted the evolution of those ideas for a long time. We're getting to the point where such a model is more practical now, but it still strikes me as hopelessly impractical even so.
It wasn't until OSX made Objective-C take off and Rails made Ruby take off that some of the fundamental language features entered the mainstream, and they did so with a gusto that other 'ivory tower' languages wish they could achieve. But only by leaving the image model behind.
It seems like something like Erlang managed to do what Smalltalk tries to do with the image better, allowing for easier to reason about deployment, collaboration, and version control while still letting you deal with a system of relatively opaque boxes of replaceable code.
It wasn't until OSX made Objective-C take off and Rails made Ruby take off that some of the fundamental language features entered the mainstream, and they did so with a gusto that other 'ivory tower' languages wish they could achieve. But only by leaving the image model behind.
It seems like something like Erlang managed to do what Smalltalk tries to do with the image better, allowing for easier to reason about deployment, collaboration, and version control while still letting you deal with a system of relatively opaque boxes of replaceable code.