&gt; Is that because Java is more a traditional &quot;source code in files, run a compiler&quot; culture, where you can scale teams just by getting better at source control?<p>Possibly. But you may be looking at history through modern lenses. Java was released in mid 90s, and the open source VC tools of the day were RCS and CVS. SVN came in 2000. The explosive growth of DVCS came after that.<p>&gt; Also, it&#x27;s probably a lot harder to scale a Smalltalk app out to a server farm than it is to just rsync a bunch of java packages and hit &quot;run&quot;.<p>A Smalltalk image is similar to a bunch of Java packages bundled into a jar&#x2F;war&#x2F;ear&#x2F;*ar file. You can run any number of OS processes, each a Smalltalk VM running an image, on a single computer. You can scale out by running Smalltalk VMs across multiple computers. Just as with Java and JVMs.