Smalltalk's death had almost nothing to do with the language itself. It died for four reasons: #1 was price, and especially requiring companies to pay royaltie

Smalltalk's death had almost nothing to do with the language itself. It died for four reasons: #1 was price, and especially requiring companies to pay royalties on the software they write with your tools, #2 was the epic mismanagement at ParcPlace/Digitalk (including the merger of the two), #3 is that Smalltalk was (when the web took off) pretty damn bad for writing server-side Web applications, because of the threading model and blocking IO, and #4 concerns about security: the lack of high quality libraries for things like encryption, for one thing, and more fundamentally, the way you can do _anything_ once you're in the VM.) The last one is the only one that's related to the tech itself. If IBM had open-sourced VisualAge when they decided to dump it, it would probably be fairly popular now.