A friend of mine who worked in a Smalltalk and Java shop shared these quotes from the Java trenches:

• “Java development expends a great deal of effort managing the integration of software components. Where as Smalltalk development can focus their energies better on addressing the business problems.”
• “Typically, a Smalltalk developer will spend most of their time thinking about the problem than coding when compared to Java developer. Not surprisingly, the over-all development effort is faster in Smalltalk, and the code is smaller and more efficient and maintainable.”
• “When development projects get under pressure, naturally developers take short cuts. When thought both Java and Smalltalk have refactoring browsers, it is much harder to refactor Java projects than Smalltalk projects. As a result, over time, my experience has been that a Java software project becomes hard to support, maintain, and enhance than a Smalltalk project.”
• “For new developers, it is much easier to learn proper OO development techniques using Smalltalk than Java. Proper techniques are a investment that will save you money by giving the project large returns in development time, effectiveness and efficiency. “
• “My current experience with source code management software is that the Smalltalk tools are much better at identifying the changes so that the core software “

There was also this humorous statement that I rather liked:

Java is kind of like kindergarten. There are lots of rules you have to remember. If you don't follow them, the compiler makes you sit in the corner until you do. There are 59+ reserved words. Everything is not an object. There are primitives, and your classes are not first class objects. And you have to remember that there is no "this" in a static method (in Smalltalk calling self in a class method would return the class itself). You have to remember to tell the compiler things several times so it knows what you're talking about (Date date = new Date()).

Heh.

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