Dan Sugalski makes an excellent point about the inclusion of wacky high end features in programming languages:

That's the point people miss. You don't provide source filters, continuations, macros, or whatever because everyone will use them, you provide them so the two or three people who will use them can produce things that would otherwise be insanely difficult. What people do use is what those few folks made, and that is what makes the difficult stuff worth providing.

The context here is a dinner after the Dynamic Langauges on the CLR BOF at OSCON last week.

James Robertson has a report from Smalltalk Solutions 2003 about set of plugins for using Smalltalk under Eclipse. This is an interesting idea, although as James points out, this will probably never be as good as a native Smalltalk environment because the extensibility points are dictated by Eclipse's Java API. It certainly might get a bunch of people to try Smalltalk. On the other hand, if this kills off the native Smalltalk IDE's then what happens once people figure out what you can really do with Smalltalk? I have to agree with James that this probably isn't going to help Smalltalk. Next we'll be hearing about Eclipse for Lisp...