[pjmlp]

My point was that Smalltalk did not became mainstream, because a few heavy weight vendors decided to switch field to support the new kid on the block.

[coldtea]

Well, a counter point then can be: and why did those vendors did not insist on Smalltalk? Why weren't Smalltalk more heavily pushed by some big vendor itself?

It's not like SUN was the only player in town. IBM pushed Smalltalk IIRC.

I think this (from StackOverflow) tells a more comprehensive story):

• when Smalltalk was introduced, it was too far ahead of its time in terms of what kind of hardware it really needed

• In 1995, when Java was released to great fanfare, one of the primary Smalltalk vendors (ParcPlace) was busy merging with another (Digitalk), and that merger ended up being more of a knife fight

• By 2000, when Cincom acquired VisualWorks (ObjectStudio was already a Cincom product), Smalltalk had faded from the "hip language" scene

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/711140/why-isnt-smalltalk...

[pjmlp]

I used VisualWorks at the university in 1995, just before Java appeared and there were presentations with broken Java code[1].

Eclipse 1.0 was Visual Age for Smalltalk redone in Java.

If Java hadn't appeared in the scene, maybe even with those cat fights, the language would have become mainstream anyway.

This just speculation from my part.

[1] The famous "private protected" that was accepted in the very first release.

[the_why_of_y]

Technically, Eclipse was Visual Age for Java [only implemented in Smalltalk] redone in Java :-)