Java did not become more popular then Smalltalk because of performance. Smalltalk performance has not been an issue for years and Smalltalk performance was much better then Java in Java's early years. Java won out for the same reason that Microsoft Windows won, marketing. In fact, Smalltalk makes exetnsive use of the flyweight pattern for performance reasons, for example in Smalltalk everything including numbers is an Object. Numbers are represented as flyweight objects, there is only 1 instance of the number 5 in a Smalltalk VM. The everything is an Object philosophy leads to a consistent language with no need for all the kludges Java has had to introduce to get around the primitive object dichotomy.
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Comments about Smalltalk misinformed