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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. |
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.