# “So why didn’t Smalltalk take over the world?”
Smalltalk did something more important than take over the world—it define the shape of the world! Alan Kay’s Dynabook vision of personal computing didn’t come with a detailed design document describing all of its features and how to create it. To make the vision concrete, real artifacts had to be invented.
Alan Kay Dynabook sketch, 1972
Smalltalk was the software foundation for “inventing the future” Dynabook. The Smalltalk programming language went through at least five major revisions at Xerox PARC and evolved into the software platform of the prototype Dynabook. Using the Smalltalk platform, the fundamental concepts of a personal graphic user interface were first explored and refined. Those initial concepts were widely copied and further refined in the market resulting in the systems we still use today. Smalltalk was also the vector by which the concepts of object-oriented programming and design were introduced to a world-wide programming community. Those ideas dominated for at least 25 years. From the perspective of its original purpose, Smalltalk was a phenomenal success.
But, I think Gilad’s question really is: Why didn’t the Smalltalk programming language become one of the most widely used languages? Why isn’t it in the top 10 of the Tiobe Index?
Gilad’s entire article is essentially about answering that question, and he summarizes his conclusions as:
> With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that from the pointy-headed boss perspective, the Smalltalk value proposition was: > > Pay a lot of money to be locked in to slow software that exposes your IP, looks weird on screen and cannot interact well with anything else; it is much easier to maintain and develop though! > > On top of that, a fair amount of bad luck.
There are elements of truth in all of those observations, but I think they miss what really happened with the rise and fall of commercial Smalltalk:
1. Smalltalk wasn’t just a language; it was a complete personal computing platform. But by the time affordable personal computing hardware could run the Smalltalk platform, other less demanding platforms had already dominated the personal computing ecosystem. 1. Xerox Smalltalk was built for experimentation. It was never hardened for wide use or reliable application deployment. 1. Adapting Smalltalk for production use required large engineering teams and in the late 1980s no deep-pocketed large companies were willing to make that investment. Other than IBM and HP, the large computing companies that could have helped ready Smalltalk for production use took other paths. 1. Small companies that wanted to harden Smalltalk needed to find a business model that would support that large engineering effort. The obvious one was the enterprise application development market. 1. To break into that market required providing a solution to an important customer problem. The problem the companies latched on to was enterprise migration from green-screens to more modern looking fat-client applications. 1. Several companies had considerable success in taking Smalltalk to the enterprise market. But these were demanding and fickle customers and the Smalltalk companies became hyper focused on fulfilling their fat-client commitments. 1. With that focus, the Smalltalk companies were completely unprepared in 1996 to deal with the sudden emergence of the web browser platform and its use within enterprises. At the same time, Sun, a much larger company than any of the Smalltalk-technology driven companies spent vast sums to promote Java as the solution for both web and desktop client applications. 1. Enterprises diverted their development tool purchases from Smalltalk companies to new businesses who promised web and/or Java based solutions. 1. Smalltalk revenues rapidly declined and the Smalltalk focused companies failed. 1. Technologies that have failed in the marketplace seldom get revived.
Smalltalk still has its niche uses and devotees. Sometimes interesting new technologies emerge from that community. Gilad’s Newspeak is a quite interesting rethinking of the language layer of traditional Smalltalk.
Gilad mentioned Smalltalk’s bad luck. But I think it had better than average luck compared to most other attempts to industrialize innovative programming technologies. It takes incredible luck and timing to become of one of the world’s most widely used programming languages. It’s such a rare event that no language designer should start out with that expectation. You really should have some other motivation to justify your effort.
But my question for Newspeak and any similar efforts is: What is your goal? What drives the design? What impact do you want to have?
Smalltalk wasn’t created to rule the software world, it was created to enable the invention of a new software world. I want to hear about compelling visions for the next software world and what we will need to build it. Could Newspeak have such a role?