I worked for a firm that tried to use Smalltalk to deliver commercial software running on Windows in the early 90's. From a learning standpoint, I learned a lot

I worked for a firm that tried to use Smalltalk to deliver commercial software running on Windows in the early 90's. From a learning standpoint, I learned a lot. From a business standpoint this is what we ran into compared to this article: Lack of a Standard. Didn't really bother us. FYI we were using Digitalk Smalltalk. People in those days didn't have the expectation of changing their toolset without incurring problems. Business Model. At that time people paid for software. The free (as in beer) software distribution model didn't yet exist. The tools were expensive but they were justified by programmer productivity. To that end, the tools made programmers very productive. It's one of the best environments I've ever worked in - and that was over 25 years ago! Performance. Ah - this is where we started having problems. At that time Smalltalk hadn't yet optimized integer arithmetic and as a result simple numerical operations were slow. The garbage collector was also difficult - when it ran it would essentially hang your machine for several minutes. That would improve over the years but it was bad early on. Performance was the deciding factor in our not using Smalltalk. Interaction with the outside world. Digitalk took care of this. It was workable, i.e. this isn't where we had problems or concerns. Deployment. Digitalk was capable of producing a Windows executable file. There were two problems though: 1) it made a guess as to which classes should be included in the executable artifact (you could manually adjust), this made automated testing extremely important because you would need to test a release candidate and 2) it employed it's own windowing system which it would embed in the executable. It never looked like a native Windows application. The marketing folks and product line managers didn't like that aspect of Smalltalk. Bottom line - poor performance and a poor end-user experience killed Smalltalk for us as it did for many others at the time. You know the saying you only get one chance to make a first impression? That goes for programming languages as well. A LOT of developers gave Smalltalk a go in the early 90's and ran into these issues. Though these issues would later be resolved by then the perception damage had been done and everyone had moved on. It's interesting that Smalltalk is one of the most influential languages that never caught on.