Goals
To make Eiffel and SmartEiffel a more widespread language, providing usable wrappers for the most commonly used free-software libraries.
To bring the benefits of the clean, efficient design of Eiffel to a wider audience of programmers that are burdened by the clumsiness of C, by the slowness of Python, by Java's and C-sharp's virtual machines and many other.
Smarteiffel has grown into a mature project over time. The current status of the compiler is really good for many project. And the code it produces is really efficient. Sometimes the code it produces is several time faster than hand written C code (I'm referring to 64 bit integers calculus) and in all the other cases it fights on par.
I also recognise that SmartEiffel is mainly a research project, written by academic professor for sake of research. This is indeed a noble goal. Eiffel is by far the best-designed-language I've ever encountered and many other programmer better than me have the same judgement.
Why hasn't it been picked up by the majority of programmers, to the point that entire companies are writing compilers for languages that are dumb, defective copies of Eiffel (think about mono and C#)?
Python comes with batteries included, in the form a good extensive standard library.
Java comes with batteries included in the form of huge JDK including most of the needed class for the average project.
Well, many people has started writing wrappers for widespread libraries.
I'm thinking about GTK, Gnome, Glib and many many of the projects that form a GNU system.
Very few of them have been successful thought.
Why? The reasons are debatable. I think that the main problem is that writing wrappers is a long, tiring effort.