It's still a mystery to me why Java "won over", given that Smalltalk had (at the time) better performing virtual machines (compared to older JVMs which were superceeded by HotSpot, which was originally used by Strongtalk) and great tooling.
It's very simple. Smalltalk was expensive. Students, hobbyists, people working at cheap corporations, startups, open source projects, and the like couldn't write, share, and distribute working systems on it.
I understand there were some good vendors with steep student discounts and the like. My roommate loved some of them. But he could not hack with friends for free (or even very cheap) on it.
And that little bit of money makes all the difference. Not that it would have taken off otherwise; there are many factors, but no language or VM that charges for access has taken off in a generation except where access to hardware is strictly limited by law (smartphones) or expense (FPGA, large scale microcontroller projects).
It's very simple. Smalltalk was expensive. Students, hobbyists, people working at cheap corporations, startups, open source projects, and the like couldn't write, share, and distribute working systems on it.
In fact, it was the deliberate strategy to become a "boutique" language, a secret weapon of the Fortune 500. The Smalltalk companies missed out on "The Bazaar" and the mindshare benefits of an open community.
It's very simple. Smalltalk was expensive. Students, hobbyists, people working at cheap corporations, startups, open source projects, and the like couldn't write, share, and distribute working systems on it.
I understand there were some good vendors with steep student discounts and the like. My roommate loved some of them. But he could not hack with friends for free (or even very cheap) on it.
And that little bit of money makes all the difference. Not that it would have taken off otherwise; there are many factors, but no language or VM that charges for access has taken off in a generation except where access to hardware is strictly limited by law (smartphones) or expense (FPGA, large scale microcontroller projects).