> …Java caused a revolution of sorts by providing free-as-in-beer…
Yes, when a well funded corporation gives away programming language runtimes and development tools — that puts language and development tool vendors out-of-business.
This is something else I've been thinking about lately as I read more about Smalltalk and Lisp. The people who have used the commercial Smalltalk and Lisp offerings from the 1980s and 1990s, including Lisp machines, seem to have had great experiences with these environments. They felt very productive in these environments, and they also lament the state of today's development tools for more popular commercially-used languages.
However, it takes a large amount of money in order to develop something like a modern-day Symbolics Genera. Where is the money going to come from? There seems to be little room in today's marketplace for modern-day equivalents of ParcPlace or Symbolics, or even Borland for that matter, since free tools are good enough for many developers. Inexpensive Unix workstations from Sun and DEC helped kill the Lisp machine, and Linux on ever-faster and ever-cheaper x86 PCs helped kill the Unix workstation market; good-enough-and-affordable seems to do better in the marketplace than polished-and-expensive. It seems to me that development tools and operating systems seem to be either the product of research organizations or are "subsidized" by companies where developer tools and operating systems are not their main businesses unless the operating system is a monopoly.
I don't see an easy way around this, though. Maybe if someone like Alan Kay or Richard Gabriel visited a FAANG campus and convinced its engineers to build their infrastructure on top of a new object-based operating system, we'd finally get a modern, full-featured Smalltalk or Lisp operating system that's at par with the commercial Smalltalks and Lisps from the 1980s and 1990s....
I can't see how something like Pharo Smalltalk is anything near something like Java unless you're comparing it to C++. Same thing with .NET. Those tools are all fine in their own way (high performance, extremely fine tuned garbage collectors, and extremely large libraries), but I can't see them being as productive once you're up to speed.
Yes, when a well funded corporation gives away programming language runtimes and development tools — that puts language and development tool vendors out-of-business.