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That seems like a weirdly reductionist view of “taking off.” Smalltalk had always been a primarily academic language whose footprint on programming languages in

That seems like a weirdly reductionist view of “taking off.” Smalltalk had always been a primarily academic language whose footprint on programming languages in general vastly exceeds its specific user base. Ruby, Python, Java, C#, etc, all owe a great deal to Smalltalk. In that sense it’s like SML and Scheme: you could fairly say “more studied than used” but that hardly makes it irrelevant.

Rochus 6y ago
> Smalltalk had always been a primarily academic language There was quite a hype in the nineties with many enterprise applications based on Smalltalk; my first contact with Smalltalk was in a commercial, not an academic setting; most of it blew away when cheap, fast (HotSpot) Java became available. > Ruby, Python, Java, C#, etc, all owe a great deal to Smalltalk. That's a bit too optimistic. E.g. Python is not a descentent of Smalltalk (see e.g. http://python-history.blogspot.com/2013/10/ http://python-history.blogspot.com/2013/10/), neither is Java (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU&feature=youtu.be&t=2448 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU&feature=youtu.be...). C# is also rather a brain child of Java and C++ than of Smalltalk.