I don&#x27;t assume there&#x27;s been no innovation. HotSpot today is faster than Strongtalk ever was. Java has lots more libraries than Smalltalk today. For a broad range purposes, it&#x27;s a better choice than Smalltalk today.<p>But a lot of what you wrote was just false. Smalltalk <i>does</i> have refactoring IDEs. It <i>does</i> have excellent debuggers. It <i>does</i> have fast JIT-compiling virtual machines. (Not as fast as Hotspot, but way faster than Ruby, Python, Perl and most other dynamic languages.)<p>Note that I&#x27;m using the present tense here. We&#x27;re not talking about technologies &quot;separated by twenty years.&quot; Smalltalk has all these features today. I brought up the history because it&#x27;s pretty cheeky to say that Java is better than Smalltalk because it has a refactoring IDE.<p>There <i>are</i> big problems in the Smalltalk world, stemming from a small community and lack of corporate investment in the technology. As much as I like Smalltalk, I don&#x27;t choose it for my day-to-day work because that would be a poor business strategy for my company. This is why I don&#x27;t believe in advocacy. You make the right choice for your situation, and most of the time, somebody else can&#x27;t make that choice for you.<p>As for honesty, yes, I do think I&#x27;m being honest. For starters, everything I wrote was true.