While doing some Smalltalk related research, I ran across this announcement on Smalltalk.org from last October:

Fellow Smalltalkers,

I have had a conference call with representatives of INCITS and it seems that getting the process restarted to revise the ANSI standard for Smalltalk is very doable.

The first step is to submit a proposal for the project of working on the Smalltalk standard. If the proposal is successful the outcome will be some form of committee which we must then populate and put to work.

This is exciting news. I am glad that some movement is taking place to update the Smalltalk standard. A stronger Smalltalk is good for the whole dynamic language community.

I think that Seaside has had a revitalizing influence on Smalltalk similkar to the influence Rails has had on Ruby. There is one critical difference between Ruby and Smalltalk: Ruby is much more approachable for the average developer. Ruby makes use of the standard development toolchain of a text editor and command prompt. While the Smalltalk environment provides great tools, it manages to do so in a way that is completely alien to many developers. I am speaking mainly of Squeak here, but I have also used VisualWorks and it isn’t any better.

Tags: ansi, smalltalk, standards