This sounds great compared to my anecdotal experience with DB write performance; but is there a collection of database performance benchmarks that this can be easily compared to?
The best source for DB benchmarking I know of is http://www.tpc.org/. The methodology is more complicated there, but the top results are around 8 million transactions per minute on $5 million systems. This FoundationDB result is more like 900 million transactions per minute on a system that costs $1.5 million a year to rent (so, approx $5 million to buy?).
The USD/transactions-per-minute metric is clear, but without a standard test suite (schema, queries, client count, etc.), comparing claims of database performance makes my head hurt.
I also think a safer (for the smartphone) and simpler interface to the FlyKly would be a killer feature. A battery indicator and an assist-level switch on the wheel itself would be gravy.
One benefit that a lot of commenters here have pointed out is very user-friendly inspection of running code. Kind of a super-REPL. I find that in Python I'm most productive in iPython's browser-based notebook interface (or Mathematica, but I find Mathematica difficult for writing things that go into web-facing applications), which offers similar features.
These notebook interfaces are REPLs, but they're a little more user friendly in the sense that you can edit history in place instead of doing a history completion and then evaluating an additional line.
Has anybody had any experience with these notebook interfaces as well as the smalltalk environment and can give a rundown of the differences?
Nice performance page. It pre-answers my follow up question, which was how linear is scaling with more cores? Looks solid.