As software developers we had the most experience building web applications using Java technology. In the Java world you find all the necessary tools, frameworks, libraries and servers to build almost anything. Java is very good at absorbing all the great abstractions like object technology, garbage collection, model-view-controller, layered systems. However, the Java world is becoming very large and complex. And all things touched by Java (especially the J2EE part) have a tendancy to become overly verbose and cumbersome. This is partly because of limitations in the Java language itself (full static typing, no interactive or dynamic modifications at runtime, little room for data driven programming) and partly it is a community thing (standards reached by consensus and political motivations).
Because we had a past exposure to both Lisp and Smalltalk, we knew that there were very good alternatives to Java. Thanks to Java, a type-safe runtime with automatic memory management and garbage collection became accepted both on the client and server side. People now know that the small price in performance is dwarfed by the advantages in productivity. Lisp and Smalltalk easily match Java feature-wise, but add full dynamic typing, allow interactive and dynamic modifications at runtime and allow for much easier data driven programming. The best part is that current Lisp and Smalltalk implementations often consume less memory and run faster than Java.
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