On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Who said anything about C, Detweiler. Smalltalk. Scheme. Postscript. There are dozens of them out there. All of them are totally machine independent. You could run Smalltalk images byte for byte identical on large numbers of different processors years and years and years ago. Byte codes aren't new either -- Smalltalk's virtual machine, PSL and others had them decades ago.
One thing that might distinguish Smalltalk's comparative market faliure from Java's apparent market success, apart from the hype, is the lack of a free implementation for windows or even an easy to use free version for dos (both of the dos ones I tried failed to work for some reason). A good free class lib for net programming and GUI programming would have helped too (something more substantial than the windowing primitives it comes with). Java has all these things. (One thing that detractors of Smalltalk claim is that it is slow--slower than Java. However there is a research dialect from Sun called Self which is supposed to be 50% as fast as C.) Also if one looks on the commercial side of things, developper versions (which are wonderful) are much more expensive than the equivalent visual basic (having purchased and tried a cheaper smalltalk for a course, I would have far preferred staying with it rather than c++ or VB. Hopefully Java does what it couldn't. However it is never too late, there is always market for very easy to learn and program OO languages that aren't c++. If you care so much Perry, you could always give it a try.)