Yeah, but I think more importantly much of the value that Rust brings would have been available 30 years ago if language development/selection wasn't so siloed, full of biases, and driven by (often undeserved) popularity.
Smalltalk I believe was designed to run on computers that wouldn't be around until the 90s and and when the 90s arrived it didn't have a big company pouring gobs of money into marketing it unlike Java. There are other factors that also contributed it's unpopularity. Like who wants to distribute a whole system for each smalltalk program they sell?
I think also Lisp and APL weren't designed to run on the weak PCs in their day. You needed to use a timesharing system to program in them.
IBM not big enough? :-)
But of course IBM's consulting group were technology neutral and pivoted from Smalltalk to Java when the wind changed.
> Like who wants to distribute a whole system for each smalltalk program they sell?
Smalltalk was marketed to corporations as a 4GL replacement for green screen systems. So enterprise wide client-server apps for insurance/reinsurance, call center outsourcing, assembly line control, options/derivatives/reconciliation, ERP CRM TLA TLA, etc etc
I don't claim to have been in "The Room Where It Happens" meetings, so I'll just say that from my lowly perspective during that period Allen Wirfs-Brock's comment ring true.