Regarding pocast #78, I want to first say I would have added my comment to it, but it appears comments are closed.

Regardless, the reason I think Smalltalk programmers may be dependent on vendors more so than other languages is the language is splintered by vendor.  What I write for VW won't run unmodified by GNU, VA, or Squeak.  There's no concept of a portable "library" that will work in each--unless I write it in C.  And even there, the way each vendor's Smalltalk calls-out to C is different.

If my single effort was to have benefits multipled by the entire community and not just my flavor I suspect there may be more and more successful community efforts.  Because of the multiple implementations, I think Smalltalk sometimes hamstrung.

Also, in two items I contributed personally, VW later came out with different implementations without any reference to what I had done.  VW's were independently developed and owed nothing to me, but what VW did was different enough that code depending on my take on a problem was incompatible with what VW came up with.  Specifically, my parcel for using standard IO and Store for Sybase.  The latter item, I think, was another community contribution, but it was made available after my own, was unsupported by VW, but distributed. 

The effect on my decision to contribute to the community then becomes, why bother if what I do will be re-implemented by VW or discarded for something else?  I may as well either wait for VW to do something or keep my inventions to myself rather than package them up to be generically installed by others.

Regarding podcast #79 (March 17--not that long ago but comments closed), the cast was talking about code that looks at certain positions of an sequenced collection using either #first, #last, and wondering why not add #second, #third, .. #thirteenth, etc.

I've used #second, #third, and #fourth myself grabbing result sets from a database connection before.  I believe it's easier and more "telling" than creating a stream on the results sets and using #next, #next, #next, #next..

Someone asked what an alternative might be, and C's scanf came to mind.  We already have string parameter substitution to build strings, but that idea might be worth expanding to insert object into arrays (on a more general level) or to remove things from them.

From his Early History of Smalltalk:

"A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers."

There may be many programmers who don't know what they're doing, but we should be consoled that many of them aren't working on projects that require they know what they're doing.  What we should be concerned about is that a lot of time and money is being spent on software vandalism that might be better spent on more productive pursuits.