>"Reading stuff like this continue to make advances and new releases is like a fever dream when everything else is all AI."

Do the advances mean anything though? Alan Kay is a personal hero of mine, I love the aesthetic of Smalltalk, and the dream-that-was once upon a time of such a system was a real missed opportunity for the evolution of programming environments. But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

> But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

It effectively already is. It may end up in the same domain as Haiku OS, Plant 9, or Squeak, but they are all still interesting domains of research.

> But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

When was it anything else? The 80s? I've can count the number of Smalltalk jobs I've seen in my career on my hand (but I have seen them)

> But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

The opposite. With LLMs you can now pick up any one of these obscure language and write a full blown AAA game engine in them. Or a database. Or a web framework. Or... anything you set your mind to. The language no longer matters. btw LLMs are exceptionally good at Smalltalk/Haskell/Perl/FORTRAN and other old/uncommon languages.