[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.