I guess "dead" is a relative term. At one time, Smalltalk seemed poised to be the next big thing in enterprise software. The Smalltalk vendors completely blew t

I guess "dead" is a relative term. At one time, Smalltalk seemed poised to be the next big thing in enterprise software. The Smalltalk vendors completely blew that opportunity and Java became the OO language of choice. There's still a significant amount of Smalltalk in banking, insurance and other big custom-software installations, but mostly it's a niche language now. I think the "Smalltalk is dead" meme comes from all the ex-Smalltalkers out there. At one point they worked on some enterprise project in Smalltalk, but then switched over to Java when that became fashionable. They remember Smalltalk fondly, but won't use it for anything "real" anymore. With the rise of the internet, niche languages are a lot more viable than they used to be, and so there's a small but vibrant community around the surviving Smalltalk implementations.