Lessons Not Learned (Yet?)

Avi Bryant writes...

In Smalltalk, however, the only thing that's in C is a tiny virtual machine that understands a very simple set of bytecodes - it knows about pushing and popping objects from the stack, accessing indexed slots, blocks, and method dispatch. What it doesn't know anything about is the language syntax, standard library, compiler, debugger, profiler, thread scheduler, exception system, and so on, and so on - all of these things are implemented in Smalltalk.

[Smalltalk] doesn't support continuations and you want to add them? No problem; 10 lines of [Smalltalk] code and you're there.

...clearly you could implement the Ruby language with a Smalltalk-style VM (hopefully one with a Smalltalk-style JIT as well, which would bring a 20x or so speed increase to the current Ruby interpreter). But really what I'm talking about is a philosophical difference, not a technical one: to Smalltalkers, it's essential that as much of a system as possible be implemented in Smalltalk, whereas this simply isn't a priority for the scripting language community, and it's the priorities rather than the individual implementations that draw me to Smalltalk.