This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Cluemeter still zero in JavaLand Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Object-oriented design is sometimes at odds with performance. From a design standpoint, it's best to encapsulate everything in an object so you can treat those objects uniformly, reuse them, and extend them. Unfortunately, modeling everything as an object can be expensive performance-wise. A case-in-point is Smalltalk, which literally models everything as an object, as opposed to Java, which provides a mix of objects and intrinsic types. Today, Java is much more prevalent than Smalltalk, due in no small part to Java's better performance.

Java is more prevalent for a number of reasons, but that's not one of them. The main reasons:

• Java has a C style syntax, making it an easier seeming move from C or C++
• Java was freely and easily available for downloading at a time when the internet was just hitting big. Smalltalk vendors made it expensive even for eval access back then
• The most well known Smalltalk vendor in 1995 was ParcPlace-Digitalk - and the company was just starting a 4 year meltdown after the merger between ParcPlace and Digitalk
• Sun spent millions hyping Java and made it easy (and inexpensive) for other vendors to license and implement the VM

To summarize, technical issues had less than nothing to do with it. Also, if a full object model guarantees slowness, perhaps Mr. Geary could explain StrongTalk and Self - both Sun research projects, btw. Yeesh.