| Lots of things went wrong. ParcPlace acquired competitor Digitalk and tried to create a Frankenstein hybrid - jigsaw? - that royally screwed things up. Around the time, the industry was very exercised about a number of features that alledgedly made PP Smalltalk bad: - non-native widgets (emulated) for windows - who cares now; - principal deployment as a single process, not natively multi-threaded, using internal virtual threads - which actually scales better; - must be able to run in the browser like java applets - :-) - can't get my head round "image" model, must have individual files This was all FUD. Developing in VisualWorks with Envy (Gemstone) centralised version control was a blissful experience I haven't seen bettered. But yes, Smalltalk and C++ faced off in industry for a number of years for the crown and then along came Java on the OSS tidal wave that effectively destroyed the business model for VisualWorks that relied on expensive licences. |
And still don't have quite a C++ IDE experience that somehow comes close to Visual Age for C++ v4 (from Smalltalk side), or Energize C++ (from Lisp side).