Lambda the Ultimate

Smalltalk influenced Flavors, the Lisp Machine object system, which then influenced CLOS.

For starters, every Sun machine first boots into Forth before running Solaris, and what about ColorForth?

http://www.colorforth.com/cf.html

This was designed to provide basic OS functionality as well so as to maximise how close to the "metal" you can get.

I have to question this "research"...

I think there has been some confusion there. There is an experimental relational language called Ruby which is used for hardware design. However, it is certainly not descended from Python and Smalltalk.

This relational Ruby is really a very cool language. It is to relations what a functional language is to functions. I recommend FP people to check it out; it's a bit mind-expanding and unlike any other programming language I have ever seen.

Some aspects of "Mother Tongues" are a little odd:
Active: thousands of users
Endangered: usage dropping off
These don't seem to be exclusive categories ;-) VB usage is probably dropping off, with many many users.

So we have the oddity of Smalltalk listed as Endangered, and Self listed as Active! I don't know that Self ever escaped the research lab?

Survival of the Fittest?
Fittest in a given environment - a modern Ecology of computer systems would make interesting reading. Moving on from that old idea that there was an ideal "climax" grouping of plants for each climatic zone, to the knowledge that history matters, a lot.

The historical accident of being among the first to become established in a new area matters for plants, and for computer languages. Plants engage in chemical warfare to suppress their competitors. For computer languages, FUD and training costs seem to suffice.