Smalltalk's thunder in the enterprise was killed when Java started to gain adoption.

Eclipse was born from Visual Age for Smalltalk and Hotspot was taken from StrongTalk project.

Java, .NET and Swift Playgrounds are now the closer we have to Smalltalk in regards to mainstream adoption.

Being image based also did not help, even though there were ways to exchange code among teams, including distributed source control tooling.

Iceberg brings full Git support to Pharo.

...closer yes. As in an erzatz of coffee is closer to coffee than say, beer.

Enterprise features are getting added. With UnifiedFFI, it now easier to bind to C libraries, so, expect more.

I am looking into providing Kerberos support etc through it. Stay tuned.

>Smalltalk's thunder in the enterprise was killed when Java started to gain adoption.

Right. I remember reading somewhere, maybe on Martin Fowler's site, that he or some other people worked on a large Chrysler project that used Smalltalk.

>Eclipse was born from Visual Age for Smalltalk

Via Visual Age for Java, IIRC. Had tried it out a bit, was slow, IIRC, maybe needed more RAM than I had then on my company PC.

There was really never any Smalltalk thunder.

The language has been around for decades and it's always been marginal, for multiple reasons (license, cost and the whole image deployment model which, even today, makes it problematic to do even the simplest things, e.g. deploy a simple Smalltalk web app to the cloud).

Depends on where on the world one were.

In 90's Portugal it was common as enterprise language used by the likes of IBM and friends, also used to teach OO in many universities (alongside C++), before Java was born.

>Would be interesting to know why this platform is not more widespread.

Yes, it would, and also interesting to know how much work is available using Smalltalk / Pharo these days. I looked at the success page, there seem to be some slick apps there (on a brief look).

As an employee I do not know. But as an entrepreneur or self employed developer providing solutions, there are quite a few successful people.

Maybe they are flying under the radar.

Yes, there are some slick apps being done, with no need for a legion to deliver a sizeable piece of functionality.

Pharo forked from Squeak because it wanted to be a vehicle to deliver business value for real and not just be a research ground. Version 6 is a significant milestone in that direction. Iceberg (Git tool) was funded by the consortium. http://consortium.pharo.org/ Check the industrial members, this is no small fish.

I guess that we are on this trajectory: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...

I was asking about both, for employees as well as self employed.

Thanks for the informative answer.

Good point about the trajectory.