...closer yes. As in an erzatz of coffee is closer to coffee than say, beer.
Enterprise features are getting added. With UnifiedFFI, it now easier to bind to C libraries, so, expect more.
I am looking into providing Kerberos support etc through it. Stay tuned.
Right. I remember reading somewhere, maybe on Martin Fowler's site, that he or some other people worked on a large Chrysler project that used Smalltalk.
>Eclipse was born from Visual Age for Smalltalk
Via Visual Age for Java, IIRC. Had tried it out a bit, was slow, IIRC, maybe needed more RAM than I had then on my company PC.
The language has been around for decades and it's always been marginal, for multiple reasons (license, cost and the whole image deployment model which, even today, makes it problematic to do even the simplest things, e.g. deploy a simple Smalltalk web app to the cloud).
In 90's Portugal it was common as enterprise language used by the likes of IBM and friends, also used to teach OO in many universities (alongside C++), before Java was born.
Eclipse was born from Visual Age for Smalltalk and Hotspot was taken from StrongTalk project.
Java, .NET and Swift Playgrounds are now the closer we have to Smalltalk in regards to mainstream adoption.
Being image based also did not help, even though there were ways to exchange code among teams, including distributed source control tooling.