[MichaelCrawford]

This happened with Smalltalk.

I was a Smalltalk coder. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It has always been clear to me that Smalltalk is far superior to Java.

I left the company after a little while, to do C++ graphics. I later heard that my former employer rewrote their Smalltalk application in Java.

Now no one uses Smalltalk anymore. While Objective-C is based on Smalltalk, Smalltalk was far easier to use, however lots of people use Objective-C. No one uses Smalltalk.

How could it have been different? My friend Kurt Thames once said that "Smalltalk is the way object-oriented programming SHOULD be done." I have always agreed with that.

But when new methods (!) of OOP arose, all the Smalltalk crowd did was gripe about how Smalltalk was far better than Java or Objective-C.

[twic]

What "new methods" are you thinking of?

What let Java get ahead of Smalltalk for me personally, as someone getting into programming in 1996, was that i could write it in the text editor i already had, compile it with a compiler i could get for free, and then post the source code on Geocities (actually, Xoom - remember that?) to share with others.

Whereas when i tried to get into Smalltalk, the first thing i had to do was learn my way around this wacky environment with its strange class browser and ultra-retro window manager, and get my head around the fact that my source code wasn't anywhere particular, and yet was everywhere, and that if i wanted to share your code, i had to somehow "file out", and then hope that my internet friends could successfully "file in" to their own potentially modified images. Once i'd got hold of the tools at all, that is.

Which is not to say that the Smalltalk environment was not better than Notepad/DOS box/javac, because of course it was. It just didn't lend itself to adoption and spread nearly as well. It was a tool for masters, with affordance for apprentices.

Also, Java had pretty good networking right in the standard library, and networking was really exciting in 1996.

[MichaelCrawford]

I'd say that your ability to write Java source in any text editor at all was, all by itself, a new method of doing Object-Oriented Programming.

We used Visual Smalltalk Enterprise. It had the cool feature that, at the end of the workday, I could make what amounted to a core dump, then the following morning I would load my core dump into a running program, and there would be all my open windows with the cursors in the right places in the source documents and so on.

That was quite cool I really enjoyed it, however that environment was profoundly non-portable. I expect that much of the success of Java as opposed to Smalltalk was the simple ability one had to post a tarball full of source code on one's FTP site.

[twic]

That wasn't new, though. C++ had that. Eiffel had that. Every programming language that isn't Smalltalk has that.

[MichaelCrawford]

I'm not dead certain but I think smalltalk may have come before C++. For sure it was in widespread use before C++ was in widespread use.

[dalke]

Smalltalk started in '71 and was used for research purposes in '72. Smalltalk '80 was the definitive version for most. This means that Smalltalk slightly predates C. By comparison, C++ didn't start until 1983.

You wrote "your ability to write Java source in any text editor at all was, all by itself, a new method of doing Object-Oriented Programming".

Simula, considered the first OO language, is text based in the same way that Java is, and not image based like Smalltalk. Since Smalltalk is inspired by Simula, I do not believe one can say using any text editor is a new method of doing OO programming.

[deeviant]

Hmm, I don't know. I'm pretty damn productive just programming in notepad(equivalent).

[wglb]

Ah, but I think that the comparison doesn't hold. In my opinion, Smalltalk was the right way to do all of what we do, and Java took the enterprise mindset by storm. There was an enormous project at a very large Insurance company near Chicago that was written in Smalltalk, but got abandoned for some obscure reason.

I think that Smalltalk has the right level of abstraction and a lot of very good other things about it.

MPI was, as the article points out, the wrong abstraction for the problem. If MPI dies, I am ok with that.

I am sad that Smalltalk is not more widely used.

[MichaelCrawford]

"Java took the enterprise by storm"

Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing a bunch of Pointy-Haired Bosses that garbage collection means that you have no memory leaks, as well as that Java was the only way to do cross-platform development.

IMHO Java is one of the very worst ways to do cross-platform, however when I ported a a Mac OS Pascal program to Java so that it could be run on both Windows and Mac, the client was completely convinced that Java was the only way that could possibly be done - this despite my loud and frequent protests that the state of Java at the time was quite poor, that the Java interpreter was dog-slow, that Java sucked the memory dry, and that I knew a whole bunch of ways to write cross-platform native code that would be far faster and use far-less memory.

The reason that Smalltalk specifically suffered from this, is that Sun made most of its money by selling servers to the enterprise. Sun Workstations were favored by scientists and engineers, however Sun's real money came from enterprise servers.

Right around that time, Smalltalk was largely used for enterprise applications. Enterprise application developers loved Smalltalk absolutely to death however the bean counters and the PHBs were more inclined to listen to marketdroids promises about garbage collection being immune to memory leaks.

Garbage collection and memory leaks are orthogonal.

[wglb]

While I agree with your conclusion, the Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing doesn't match what I observed. I was at allstate at the time, and when the groundswell of attention paid by the rank and file was sufficiently overwhelming (in a positive way), that the PHBs had to say "chill. We need to investigate this" in true Gartner fashion. Later, it did get adapted, but there is a lot of .net there.