notdeadSTer

I suspect it was performance, cruft, and aesthetics that killed it more than price. After all, expensive things that get popular generally become cheaper (or have cheaper versions released).

I think performance was a huge problem (I did mention it in passing). But you have to remember that just getting your hands on Smalltalk was difficult back then. There were no free versions, and the commercial versions were expensive. At least with Unix, most university workstations in the 80s had a copy, unlike VMS. The result: a proliferation of free Unix-like OSes while the less accessible VMS slowly fades into obscurity.

I'm pretty sure that Rubyists are no more ignorant of Smalltalk than Smalltalkers are of Simula.

I don't understand the analogy. Ruby is an unoriginal Smalltalk knock-off that compromises its purity, simplicity, and dynamicity. Rubyists should therefore express deep admiration for Smalltalk in the same way Smalltalkers do Lisp, but they don't. Simula was an ALGOL-60 derivative that had classes and co-routines; by comparison, Smalltalk was nothing short of revolutionary, yet I've never seen a Smalltalker attack it.

That's nice of you to say, but I think Smalltalk will probably remain unpopular because it's too different (image-based environment), too powerful (in the Lisp sense, where you can modify core parts of the system while it's running, including the compiler), and worst of all, it's now old, and most developers aren't interested in old tech.

You're correct; a product line merger was attempted but failed, so VSE was ultimately just killed off.

Notice ParcPlace's offering is more than 7x that of MS or Borland. I believe both it and Digitalk's competitively-priced alternative were merged into a single product after PP and Digitalk merged.

I generally like Uncle Bob, but he isn't a Smalltalker and didn't demonstrate any insight into Smalltalk's unpopularity in that talk.

Worse, this is hardly the first or only time a prominent Rubyist ignorant of Smalltalk has publicly attacked it. Sarah Mei did so in a talk two years ago, mocking it for not having any conferences of its own (ESUG, Pharo Days, and Smalltalks apparently don't count), and she and Steve Klabnik recently had fun tweeting anti-Smalltalk quips back-and-forth.

Given that most of the non-awful stuff (where "awful" means, for example, syntax too complicated to be described by a CF grammar or horrible performance) they like about Ruby was lifted directly from Smalltalk, you'd expect Rubyists to be extremely deferential and respectful towards Smalltalk and Smalltalkers, but they aren't. Instead they're arrogant and condescending despite being ignorant, validating all of the well-earned stereotypes of Rubyists.

As for why Smalltalk "died" (cf. pharo.org) I would say it was too expensive, both in licensing terms and hardware costs. You could outfit entire teams with Borland or MS tools for the price of a single seat license for Smalltalk. Some vendors would charge (and still charge) a percentage of your revenue forever, which is insane. Then Java came along, and it was free.

Smalltalk also missed out on the open source revolution, not having viable libre implementations (Pharo, GNU) until relatively recently.