yeah . . .
That was in answer to you. There was a period of a couple hours on the 25th where everything I posted ended up being posted in the wrong place. At first, I thought I'd made a stupid mistake, but it very quickly became clear that TR was having some kind of fit. Somehow, I imagine George Ou typing "shutdown -h now" in the wrong terminal window -- except, of course, that option doesn't exist with Windows, and I'm sure he wouldn't be caught dead using bash.
I think perhaps one of the factors that contributes to a language's commercial success, believe it or not, is its difficulty of use. The more difficult a language is to use, the more likely it is to be viewed as a "serious" programming language. Smalltalk suffers from the problem of being far too easy to use.
Things have been creeping gradually closer and closer to being easy to use with new languages, but anything that departs significantly from the average value of ease in contemporary languages will be viewed with suspicion. Think about it: if you code in assembly language, you're viewed as some kind of programming genius, while if you use Smalltalk you're just weird.
Even worse is Logo. As I've mentioned, UCBLogo is basically just an easier to use Lisp. It's a victim of its own success as an instructional language, however -- even more so than Scheme. Both are regarded as not being "serious" languages in part because they have been so successful for teaching programming concepts in an educational setting. It's worse for Logo because of the fact that it's easy enough to be used to introduce actual children to programming. It's so easy to use that "real programmers" scoff at it. "Isn't that the thing with the turtle?"
Sure. It's also the example language for a trilogy of advanced computer science textbooks used at UC Berkeley. It's also Lisp, complete with macros, if you get the right implementation of Logo.
. . . but it's far too easy to use for anyone to take it seriously. C'est la vie.
