Gilad Bracha gave an interesting talk (or in his words, "[maybe] the best talk I ever gave") called "Utopia and Dystopia: Smalltalk And The Wider World", where he posits a universe where the Smalltalk community has recognized and proactively fixed this problem, along with some other problems that outsiders see when they look at Smalltalk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDwlEJGP3Mk

His blog is also great to follow as a general programming blog, and as it turns out, he wrote a post just two weeks ago where he rehashes some of the content.

https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-o...