[Newbies] Why hasn't Smalltalk been wildly accepted?

[Todd Blanchard]

Because the primary vendor for Smalltak - ParcPlace Systems, pursued  
a strategy of maximizing profit per user instead of profit overall.   
In its heyday, VisualWorks cost something like $3000 per user and so  
almost nobody could afford to learn it unless they could do it on the  
job at their employer's expense.   Even the academic license was  
something like $500 - pretty steep for a student.

Nevertheless, IBM had invested heavily in Smalltalk as a replacement  
for COBOL.  IBM had VisualAge Smalltalk running on every piece of  
hardware they sold from Mainframes down to PCs.  The value  
proposition they intended to offer was that companies could write  
systems in VAST, then buy hardware according to their scaling  
requirements.  Outgrow your system?  Just move up to a larger  
machine.  They could have been very successful with this, but Sun  
released Java and made it clear they would spend BIG on promoting it  
to make it successful.  IBM didn't see competing as sensible and  
figured it would be cheaper to just build Java tools using VAST and  
use that for their scalable app platform.  This was seen as a win  
because IBM would not have to spend to promote their new development  
platform.

Java gained ground because anyone who wanted to try it could just  
download it and learn it.  This wasn't possible with Smalltalk - so  
nobody learned it.

At least, this is how things looked to me as an enterprise systems  
architect in the mid-1990's.


On Aug 8, 2006, at 2:17 AM, 啸然 wrote:

> My opinion is, the power of Smalltalk is same as an OS, but  
> Smalltalk is as a programming language. The Smalltalk should be an OS.
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