However, I dislike object-oriented programming in general.
- Rarely are objects and the relationships bewteen them meaningful to the problem being solved.
- The problem can always be solved in a more efficient way using the von Neumann model. The dominant archiecture of computers today.
- I don't like being limited to a single mode of programming.
As a system, Smalltalk is not very promising. The prominant Squeak system is quite large and not that responsive compared to existing systems. Improvement from the users perspective requires consuming less resources, and a faster response, among other things. It could be that the squeak developers went a little feature crazy. Squeak doesn't seem to have a purpose, other than to show how various things might be coded in Smalltalk. Maybe it is possible to have a much smaller smalltalk with adequate performance, and usable applications.
Impovement though, is very much possible. Just look at the slop that passes as functioning C code these days. Impovements to existing systems can be made in speed, resource consumpion, code size, simplicity, and the user interface. All of these can be improved by orders of magnitude, without coding everything in assembly. However it is required that you start from scratch, in an extremly capable language.
In this reguard, the most promising system to me is the colorForth system. The philosophy of this system is to cast off as much bagage as possible and start fresh. The system is %100 original code by Chuck Moore. Performance is excelent. Although the code is not purely optimized for speed like compiled C. colorForth chooses a much simpler compiler instead. In fact the compiler and the entire core software is under 2k. Extensibility is at the heart of the lanugage, so the large range in semantics required by a modern system can be expresed elegantly in the language.
The reason why colorForth can achieve such improvement, is that it relies purely on human ingenuity. The only limit in how good the code is, is in the programmer writing the code. The reason why the compiler does so little, is that the code is already human optimized.
For software to improve, I believe we must rely primarily on our own creative abilility. Automation of creative tasks makes us the slave to the machine.