Does functional programming work?

[Walter Bright]

yigal chripun wrote:
> Have you ever actually used Smalltalk?? I have used it and it's the
> easiest language to use by far, having conditionals as methods of
> Boolean is much better, easier to read and more flexiable.
> 
> The beauty of smalltalk is that you can easily add new "language"
> features in the library with little effort and they do not look
> foreign to the language. in fact, almost all of smalltalk is
> implemented in the library and it only has 5 actual keywords.


What's your opinion, then, about why Smalltalk has failed to catch on?