There is an important technical / licensing / business problem with Smalltalk that has not been mentioned -- lack of library standardization.
Apart from a few core classes, each Smalltalk implementation had different class names and method names for things that once-upon-a-time were special but quickly became commonplace -- like windows and menus and …
So you could never hire a "Smalltalk" developer: you hired a VW developer or a Smalltalk/V developer or a VA developer and waited for them to get up to speed with an unfamiliar environment.
Notice ParcPlace's offering is more than 7x that of MS or Borland. I believe both it and Digitalk's competitively-priced alternative were merged into a single product after PP and Digitalk merged.
Different Smalltalk implementations, different prices:
https://books.google.com/books?id=wJswszKTwl4C&pg=RA1-PA43&l...
>>Then Java came along, and it was free.<<
Free and The-Future-of-the-Internet TM.
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There is an important technical / licensing / business problem with Smalltalk that has not been mentioned -- lack of library standardization.
Apart from a few core classes, each Smalltalk implementation had different class names and method names for things that once-upon-a-time were special but quickly became commonplace -- like windows and menus and …
So you could never hire a "Smalltalk" developer: you hired a VW developer or a Smalltalk/V developer or a VA developer and waited for them to get up to speed with an unfamiliar environment.