as you can see from the discussion [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=101330|here]

The Smalltalk vendors were their own worst enemies. When Java came out, all the Smalltalk vendors immediately jumped on the bandwagon and stopped really pushing their Smalltalk products. Gemstone came out with Gemstone/J and removed the focus from Gemstone/S, ObjectShare did the same, and IBM completely stopped pushing Smalltalk (even when their own IDE VisualAge for Java was written in Smalltalk). With vendors like that who needs enemies? The world at large saw even the Smalltalk vendors retreating and therefore believed that Smalltalk was dead. If the Smalltalk vendors in the early 1990's had pushed Smalltalk Java would have been stillborn, no one would have used such a pile of crap like JDK 1.02 if they had been familiar with the capabilities of Smalltalk.

The more I use Java the more I realize how fundamentally flawed the language is. Think about this, JDK 1.5 is coming to fix a whole bunch of development issues with Java (generic types, enums, etc.). The fix is, a bunch of compiler tricks. In other words, these issues remain with the language, just the compiler will now generate even more code to hide them from you. Absolutely pathetic. What is even more upsetting is reading the articles about it, how everyone thinks these silly enhancements are cool and make Java a great language.