Smalltalk didn’t “fail.” Has it fallen from grace in recent decades? Yes, but Smalltalk has never failed.

It is still widely used around the world in thousands of enterprises. These enterprises are supported by no fewer than three major Smalltalk vendors: Cincom, Instantiations, and GemTalk Systems.

Smalltalk is being used in nearly every imaginable application category: enterprise applications such as ERP; web apps; data science; machine learning; robotics; virtual reality; Internet of Things; industrial control such as silicon wafer fabrication at Lam Research; cryptographic work such as at Canada’s Communications Security Establishment; and so on.

However, I don’t deny that Smalltalk’s user community today is much smaller than it was 25 years ago. Much smaller than, say, the Python user community.

At its peak in the 1990s, Smalltalk was the second most popular object-oriented language in the world, after C++. It was so popular that IBM adopted it for its VisualAge enterprise initiative.

In 1995, ComputerWorld wrote about Smalltalk going head-to-head with C++.

Then Java came along. Sun Microsystems’ marketing blew Smalltalk out of the water and it has been struggling to recover ever since.

This year, 2022, Smalltalk celebrates its 50th anniversary. It had a huge birthday bash: