Smalltalk first appeared in 1972, and was a stable commercial product by 1980.

Java didn't hit the market until over a decade and a half later.

If you can't build adoption with a 15+ year head start, then it's not the next generation's fault. It just wasn't going to happen.

From 1980 to the late 80s or so people were struggling just to get Smalltalk to perform at reasonable speeds on microcomputer class hardware, so saying 1980 isn't really fair. And most of the research that went into getting Smalltalk (and Self) to perform well on those platforms was then used to get Java to perform.

In actuality, Smalltalk gave Java a headstart.

That said, Smalltalk just doesn't in general "play well with others"; its image based development environment, especially.

>people were struggling just to get Smalltalk to perform at reasonable speeds on microcomputer class hardware

I've heard this before, but it confuses me as apparently the majority of the systems at Xerox Parc (Window manager, word processor, etc. ) were written in Smalltalk. So how could these sophisticated GUI apps perform there but not on other platforms, was the hardware really so different?

Yes, they were drastically different. Xerox built their own systems. Look up the Dolphin and Alto, they were basically minicomputer-class systems with custom CPUs built out of 74 series and bitslice components, no single-chip microprocessor. And very expensive.

It wasn't until the mid to late 80s that microprocessor systems built around the 68k series were able to run Smalltalk 80 well. And that was with Tektronix and others spending thousands of man hours developing techniques to implement the VM well. And many of those systems were still basically dedicated to Smalltalk and cost a fortune.

The simple answer to this question is that not all software at Xerox PARC was written in Smalltalk. In fact, Smalltalk was just one out of a few different languages and programming environments that Xerox PARC used. For example, the Bravo word processor was written in BCPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(software)). Mesa was also developed at Xerox PARC and was commonly used as an implementation language. Interlisp was also largely developed at Xerox PARC.

> stable commercial product by 1980

This is not true. Even the Smalltalk-80 Blue Book wasn't released until 1983.

> If you can't build adoption with a 15+ year head start

Historical context is important here. FOSS etc were not nearly as prevalent as they are now, and most major development environments had a price. The main Smalltalk players probably got it wrong by pricing out expensive licensing fees. But the head start does not matter when the next thing that comes along is released for free, which is what happened with Java.

There was also the issue of "viral pricing". As the application was grown as a extension of the image, people were supposed in some schemes to not only pay for their own copy, but also for every copy of the software they wrote and shipped to customers, as it piggybacked on the original image. While free software thrived on copyleft, the first Smalltalks withered on "payleft".

Wouldn't that be payleftandright? ;)

Except it was happening, that is why gang of four book uses C++ and Smalltalk on their examples.

Had IBM kept selling Visual Age products instead of jumping into Java ship, history would have turned out much differently.

Or if the Strongtalk guys hadn't return back to Sun and basically turn a Smalltalk VM into a Java one.

JUnit was also born in Smalltalk for those not paying attention.

Java was able to ride the wave of the web's rise in popularity, particularly with their marketing of applets and the "network as the computer", with the idea of downloading Java code as needed to supplement the software you're using at the time. That and there was lots of talk about how the JVM was going to be the runtime of the future for all languages.

It's funny how Javascript and the web have turned out to be a more popular target. Nobody back in the late 90s/early 2000s would have thought that. JS was a toy and html was going away in favor of Flash or Java applets or .NET.

At any rate, timing is a really important part of gaining widespread adoption. Smalltalk was way ahead of its time in the 70s, but too early to really take advantage of networking, as their target was stand-alone personal computers.

> … too early to really take advantage of networking…

So how do you explain "HP Distributed Smalltalk" ? :-)

https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a11.pdf

How do you explain "Gemstone/S" ?

https://gemtalksystems.com/products/gs64/

language developers consistently underestimate the importance of "Algol-like syntax" in allowing mainstream adoption.

Actually language developers consistently underestimate the importance of large corporations pushing languages no matter what developers think about them.

Smalltalk lost the day IBM decided to join Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge

> VisualAge Micro Edition, which supports development of embedded Java applications and cross system development, is a reimplementation of the IDE in Java. This version of VisualAge morphed into the Eclipse Framework.

some reading from that era: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/the_parcplace_digitalk_mer...

Java was free and open source and based on files rather than an image.

Free as in "free beer", but not open source until much, much later.

Interestingly enough the JVM hotspot compiler was done by Smalltalkers (checkout Strongtalk)

Java was free. (And marketed by a large organization.)

It's true, and a huge point. Until Squeak came along I as a hobbyist -- who was really interested in Smaltalk -- simply couldn't get my hands on a Smalltalk (other than GNU Smalltalk which doesn't count). All through the 80s and early 90s I salivated at screenshots and descriptions of it, but never got to play with it.

That said, When I did finally get Squeak, I found it pretty neat, but it just never blew me away like I thought it would. I just didn't have anything to do with it.

Java was an answer to C++, not to Smalltalk, which had already been dead for a while by the time Java started taking off.

It's more accurate to say it hadn't really come alive yet.

But still as late as 96, 97, 98 you could still find job postings advertising for Smalltalk developers. I know, because early-20s me really wanted to do be doing that, but I wasn't qualified.

Within a few years Smalltalk had vanished from the few industry pockets it had, and was replaced by Java in most cases.

Fun fact: I know one company in Russia which built aerospace-grade product in Smalltalk as late as 2010s. I don't know, maybe they still use it right now, maybe it had been replaced, all my friends in this company changed job in last 10 years.