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Maybe if IBM had not rebooted their Smalltalk business into Java, Smalltalk would have been kept more relevant than it is nowadays.

For the younger generations, the whole set of Visual Age IDEs were written in Smalltalk, SOM (the OS/2 COM like OOP ABI) had support for C, C++ and Smalltalk, making Smalltalk the kind of OS/2's .NET.

Then Visual Age became Eclipse, and the Smalltalk business pivoted into Java.

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> the Smalltalk business pivoted into Java

Interestingly OTI (which was purchased by IBM in 1996 and did all the Smalltalk/Visual Age and later Eclipse) had a VM that could run both Smalltalk and Java bytecode:

in order to accomodate Java execution, OTI developed what was called the UVM (or Universal Virtual Machine) whcih could execute both Smalltalk and Java byte-codes, and used Smalltalk to implement the Java primitive functions which were implemented in C in the Sun JVM.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090611013334/http://talklikead...

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