I am interested in VMs, so why do I need to care about the language on top? Actually, I do research in how to support all kind of different languages on top of the same VM, because there is not a single language that is the ultimate answer to all problems. That is why I do not care about any particular language. Just look at the JVM. How much of its technology was developed in the pure Java context? Not a lot. Most was actually conceived for Smalltalk. As long as the languages have some commonalities and are not based on graph-reduction like Haskell, then they usually don't require a completely new designed VM, but a nice set of common abstractions. So why, as a researcher, should I care about Smalltalk? Smalltalk is not the final answer, and will never be. Neither is any other single language. +1 Just answer the question! How often do your colleagues grab a book from the shelf? How often a day, how often a week? Some of my colleagues use books quite often. They like to put their monitors on them. :) Still, there is already a good thing coming out of the whole flame war. Laurent took the time to look into how to make the books web-accessible. All it took was a small nudge in the right direction. Yay :)
Lets stop this thread in peace and have a nice weekend :) Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!