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An interesting commonality among the three examples you listed: they're all designed for a world when computing was a more solitary activity than it is now.

For Lisp and Smalltalk, image-based development is a genuine hurdle in the modern world. It complicates many aspects of modern highly-collaborative software development, including version control and continuous integration. I think that the language's respective hacker ethoses might also be a challenge in light of how often people switch jobs nowadays. I haven't used Smalltalk for pay money, but my experience has been that initially getting settled into a large pre-existing Lisp project does take more brain effort than it seems to with a language like Java. (In the long run I'd rather inherit a Lisp project, but I also acknowledge that first impressions are important.)

And BeOS was not a multiuser OS and didn't seem to have a clear path to becoming one. I'm pretty sure the main thing preventing it from becoming as much of a cybersecurity disaster as Windows 95 was is the simple fact that there wasn't any honey in that pot.



Image-based development was never good. So we pushed it back again and again, so that we nowadays have a single image component we named "database" and most of the work is free from its problems.

That doesn't mean we stopped doing it.




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