[ltta]

Java probably won because of its C-inspired syntax. At that point smalltalk was falling behind and C++ started to take off. To me Java was always meant as a better C++. At least that is my guess.

A lot of the people behind Self went on to work on the JVM JIT and later the Chrome V8 engine. Self produced many influential ideas in the JIT space like polymorphic inline caches and deoptimization and stack rewriting. Some of the papers published by the Self group at UCSB are fascinating.

[nickik]

The syntax is something, but they could easly have written another parser for sell and make it look very C like. That would have been 100x less work.

Many of the people that worked on Self later worked on Strongtalk, that was bought and is the bases for the current JVM, and yes now everything that was in Self is in the JVM.

So my point is, why not just start where they ended up anyway. In one of David Ungars talks he said something like "they probebly just didn't know what they had". Thats about the only thing that makes sence, but maybe somebody knows more then me.