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I was excited in Smalltalk around 1999, during my Master Thesis. The sad story is Java Hotspot had more technology than ParcplaceDigitalk(Cincom) and kept growing. I love Smalltalk but Java won, even when it was closed sources. Try Squeak (or Cuius): it is beautiful,but sadly it has little traction.

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Java didn't win, you are still free to code in whatever language you are comfortable in. At least until the great big Jenga tower stack of modern-day dependencies and API's your language relies on eventually stop working, which is the real killer, not how good or bad your chosen language is.

Smalltalk technology acquired by Sun lives on Hotspot, while IBM's Smalltalk technology lives on Eclipse and J9, and Rogue Wave had one of the first collection frameworks.

It doesn't help when Smalltalk vendors were the first to jump into Java.

Small clarification: the Smalltalk technology absorbed by HotSpot was StrongTalk's static type-based optimization techniques combined with dynamic recompilation (what we now moniker as a JIT) originating from research done with Self (which was also part of Sun at the time).

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