The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
One of the things that Allen only barely hints at and I'm not sure Gilads piece really touches on was the shifting economics in Software development. In 1995/96 when Java gut punched the wind out of Smalltalk and the other OO solutions (CLOS, Eifel, Beta, etc), they spent a butt load on marketing and gave the stuff away for free. In other industries it would be called "dumping." It wasn't just Sun giving Java away. It was also the beginning of the rise of Linux, also free. I remember a colleague pointing out "there is no money in tools anymore, there's a few niche islands left, but they'll fail too."<p>I think neither of these articles aptly covers this counter trend enough. Whilst Smalltalk had come out of the kind of freeish academic research zone with its small band of developers of un-patroned developers trying to eke out a living, the industry was clamoring to free and open source.<p>What I wouldn't give to have closures that were as simple and robust and approachable as Smalltalk in any of the languages I work in today (Swift, Kotlin, Python, Dart, C).<p>(Did 20 years of Smalltalk, including 6 years at Cimcom)