I actually went in the oposite direction: I started with C++ and Java. Until I had the opportunity to work with a very interesting team using Smalltalk (this wa

I actually went in the oposite direction: I started with C++ and Java. Until I had the opportunity to work with a very interesting team using Smalltalk (this was in 2004, so St was not popular anymore, but I liked the team and it was an opportunity to learn). The article is very good describing what failed, from business to technology. Why people jumped from St to Java? Besides the licenses and the OS movement that took many St companies off guard, there were also technical issues: - Java was better for server side work. It had mature frameworks for Http/XML/Database access. Big companies allocated tons of resources to create Java frameworks and tools... the situation for St was different, you were at your own. For example, I had to debug and fix the WebServices framework available in VisualAge... because I didn’t have another choice. - The JVM was superior in many areas: native threads, different GC algorithms, JIT, and many tools for monitoring and troubleshooting. Most of the St VMs only had green threads, it means that any blocking native libraries (like DB drivers) are problematic. - As the article says, enterprises moved from desk apps to the web. And web frameworks for St arrived late. - The classic St-80 was not designed with the idea of packages in mind. Loading a package is basically executing code that modifies your image. It’s powerful, but problematic because it can introduce unexpected bugs. Strongtalk tried to fix that, but it was a research project. - To the package isolation problem, add the fragmentation between St implementations... it didn’t help to create an open source ecosystem of shared libs like in Java. What I miss? The environment! In St you have absolute control of the environment. You can inspect everything (including your editing tools), and evaluate code everywhere without having to stop the world. Today you have editors or IDEs with plugin APIs, but is not the same. A comparable experience is modifying things live in the web browser, but it lacks the inspection/authoring tools from St.