From this article: "So why didn't Smalltalk take over the world? "With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that from the pointy-headed boss perspective, the Smalltalk

From this article: "So why didn't Smalltalk take over the world? "With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that from the pointy-headed boss perspective, the Smalltalk value proposition was: "Pay a lot of money to be locked in to slow software that exposes your IP, looks weird on screen and cannot interact well with anything else; it is much easier to maintain and develop though! On top of that, a fair amount of bad luck." That's not the "pointy-headed boss" perspective. That's my* perspective, and I was working in Smalltalk in 1992-4, when "why doesn't Smalltalk take over the world?" was a valid question. FFIs were a royal pain in the ass, and that was what I was doing. (Somehow, the Digitalk (? Memory is hard.) image we were passing around developed a bug, probably from something in the FFI. It would periodically just crash. No way to fix it---it originally started while our proggy was working but eventually worked its way out until it happened anytime---because something in the image itself was corrupted. We could have filed-out all of our code and started with a clean image.... Source control? Ha! You saved your image to a floppy and passed it around to your co-workers. And you liked it! Deployment? Yeah, we once had to send our proggy to someone who didn't have licenses for some of the things we used. That was fun. And it still involved shipping the whole language, image and environment. These aren't just some "nice to have" features; they were significant friction that made doing anything real difficult. (Common LISP had the same issues, although its source control story was much better.) I haven't looked at Newspeak (or Strongtalk, or Self) (but I will) to find out how it deals with those problems, but as for "Why doesn't Smalltalk take over the world?", that bus has already left the station. EDIT https://newspeaklanguage.org/downloads.html https://newspeaklanguage.org/downloads.html "The current prototype is based on Squeak, and contains code that is subject to the Squeak License, as well as the Newspeak sources, which are mostly under the Apache 2.0 license. More details about the licensing of this software are available on the license page." This isn't starting well.