> Many of those "lots of FP features where it makes sense". were already present in Smalltalk.
Good point. And both Java and Ruby borrowed from Smalltalk (according to Wikipedia Kotlin does not, but that is: not directly.
Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard), and we needed streams and now Kotlin to fix that :)
Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.
> Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.
A lot of Smalltalk-style syntax was absolutely massive for a decade or so you could argue, at least under the guise of the gazillions of iPhone apps that were written in Objective-C. This random blog post probably does a better job than me:
> https://richardeng.medium.com/apple-has-been-using-smalltalk...
> Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard)
You guess correctly. Java was easy for C++ developers to learn which was beneficial for adoption at the time.
"Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback."
This would be my guess, I always heard nice things about it and liked many concepts, but the syntax was just plain ugly to me, so I never felt the urge to try it out. I imagine others felt similar.