You're right that I don't know his work that well and probably extrapolated too much from this interview. I just get a little irritated at people (even smart, famous people) who criticize successful projects like the Web or Wikipedia for not being good enough, or inferior to their own work, without acknowledging that their success in the marketplace shows that they must have done something right.
I'm glad he's working on STEPS; I'm eager to see him push the boundaries of what is possible, and if it succeeds, it will validate his ideas. But Smalltalk and Squeak have been around for decades, and yet the Web and Wikipedia are orders of magnitude more popular. So why does he have to bash their creators as "amateurs" or "lacking imagination" when their ideas have caught hold in a way that his work has not? What does he have to back up this criticism? Sure, a lot of the ideas from Smalltalk and his early work on object-oriented design have influenced other programming languages, but he himself says that the way in which object-oriented design evolved runs counter to his vision, not in support of it.
I'm glad he's working on STEPS; I'm eager to see him push the boundaries of what is possible, and if it succeeds, it will validate his ideas. But Smalltalk and Squeak have been around for decades, and yet the Web and Wikipedia are orders of magnitude more popular. So why does he have to bash their creators as "amateurs" or "lacking imagination" when their ideas have caught hold in a way that his work has not? What does he have to back up this criticism? Sure, a lot of the ideas from Smalltalk and his early work on object-oriented design have influenced other programming languages, but he himself says that the way in which object-oriented design evolved runs counter to his vision, not in support of it.