Can you imagine if the standard language of enterprise development today were Smalltalk? That would've meant that TDD would've had to have been de rigeur. So l

Can you imagine if the standard language of enterprise development today were Smalltalk? That would've meant that TDD would've had to have been de rigeur. So likely, this would've been an alternative universe where Extreme Programming got created earlier to overcome some of the weaknesses of Smalltalk as an enterprise language. It would also have helped if some of the internecine fighting between Smalltalk companies (and parts of merged Smalltalk companies) didn't happen. Also, this would have required an ANSI standard for Smalltalk that wasn't manipulated by big companies into something toothless and hazy. This would've helped to create a more cohesive greater language community outside of individual implementations. Because of the toothless standard, combined with the ease of rolling your own, the Smalltalk community balkanized itself into different incompatible dialects. Can you imagine if the standard language of the Web were Lisp (or Scheme)? There would have been, possibly, a true "write once run everywhere" environment. Squeak demonstrates the feasibility of this. The thing runs with a bit identical virtual machine model on something like a hundred different platforms. However, there would have been a serious rash of network security problems. Because it's hard to prove things in Smalltalk, the preferred model for web app security was signed code, which is far from a panacea. There were some people thinking about sandbox schemes, including myself, but Smalltalk VMs are also generally prone to the same kinds of security holes as other VMs, like Dalvik. Can you imagine if we'd sunk all the work into making Lisp & Smalltalk great that we instead sunk into making Java & JavaScript not so terrible that they cause spontaneous seppuku? Actually, Sun approached ParcPlace -- or whichever was the "original" Smalltalk company at the time -- and asked to use their VM for their set top box project. The Smalltalkers rebuffed them, so they went on to create their own VM. This Java was born. Smalltalk was almost Java, and missed its chance many times over, mainly because of culture. Smalltalk could've been LightTable decades earlier, if we'd only had faster hardware, the internet with something like YouTube, and a better community attitude towards outreach.