Curated Picks

Commercial Smalltalk vendors exited or downsized in the late 1990s and early 2000s as enterprise customers migrated to Java and other free runtimes, according to accounts from ParcPlace, Digitalk, and IBM alumni. The article argues that licensing costs per developer, deployment fees, and memory footprints made Smalltalk systems harder to justify once Java offered a VM-based, garbage-collected model at zero cost. Former practitioners attribute the decline to vendor focus on proprietary IDEs and GUI builders rather than standardization, tooling interoperability, and deployment workflows. The concrete result was the collapse of a commercial ecosystem, with Smalltalk surviving primarily through open-source implementations like Squeak and Pharo without comparable enterprise adoption.

Commercial Smalltalk adoption collapsed after 1996 as major vendors exited the enterprise tools market and new Smalltalk application development largely stopped. Allen Wirfs-Brock attributes this shift to enterprise customers redirecting spending toward web architectures and Java, combined with vendor focus on fat-client tooling that left Smalltalk platforms unprepared for browser-centric deployment. The mergers of ParcPlace with Digitalk and IBM’s subsequent pivot from VisualAge Smalltalk to Java and Eclipse are cited as concrete inflection points. The outcome was vendor failure, long-term maintenance of existing systems by niche firms, and Smalltalk’s retreat to a fragmented but persistent community.