It is comparing programming languages. The study averages over all the language projects, including their choice of preferred toolchains. If there are more effective toolchains available, their lack of usage is clearly factored into the study.
That's a good point. But reducing a programming language ecosystem to one number isn't the statistic I'm interested in. I want to see the distribution in some way e.g. standard deviation. What's 'good' in each look like?
Yes, all the advantages have been there from the start, but they may not be known to most people. It's really a matter of education and public awareness.
Smalltalk is not the only language to face this dilemma. Nearly every new language that comes to market does, as well. For example, Ceylon, Clojure, Crystal, Dart, Elixir, Haxe, Julia, Nim, Rust.
