But there was an affordable Smalltalk system in the early 1990s -- Digitalk's Smalltalk/V. It cost $99 and came with a huge manual that had a great tutorial. It introduced me (and lots of others) to the whole idea of object-orientation.
I've seen this several times. You need to get the stuff to the students who usually have no money to spare.
Emphasis on "NO". Affordable doesn't cut it.
If you can't download it from somewhere for free, something else will be used by students that will later determine what they'll use at their startups or companies.
I'm not denying that the modern world of open source tooling and online documentation is better, but in the 1980s-early-1990s that's just not how it was. Things like Turbo Pascal and Smalltalk/V cost money, but not that much, and were worth it because of the large printed manuals they included, which were needed because you couldn't just Google things.
I say that it was an additional barrier to entry which got more significant the later we are in the 90s. That it was free was a significant boost for the popularity of Java (probably also the free JVM from Microsoft was a significant contributor).
In the early 80s you always had a programming language for free with your computer and often, those manuals were not bad either as that was seen as an additional selling point for the hardware and that's why the hardware producers did it.
Yes, which does not contradict his original point. Java arrived in the mid 90s, and unlike many of its competitors you could just download Java and use it for free which gave Java a competitive advantage. Universities had good Internet connections at that point.
It was probably too late (around 1996 to 97), but there was Smalltalk Express which was essentially Smalltalk/V for Windows that was released for free after ParcPlace and Digitalk merged. It never received any updates though and was only a Windows 3.1 program. It also came with a lengthy tutorial (actually a 16 chapter book) in HTML format.
Here it is running under Windows 10 (thanks to otvdm/winevdm that allows running 16bit programs in 64bit windows): https://i.imgur.com/r5aQNyJ.png
The Smalltalk vendors provided student licenses / educator licenses.
Back in 1998, "…the largest object-oriented course in the world: the Open University’s new introduction to computing, for which over 5,000 students have enrolled for its first year. The course introduces computing from a systems-building stance specifically, through object technology, Smalltalk and our own adaptation and extension of Goldberg’s LearningWorks programming environment."
I went to college in 1995... $99 would have likely been out of reach.
I had access to C/C++ in high school on a PC only because my father ran an engineering group and brought home a VC++ license for us. I didn't get to use it that much before heading off to college.
I mostly used BASIC early on cause we had it free with the first 2-3 PCs we had. By High School I had gotten my hands on Turbo Pascal for free, maybe again through my father. High School classes were in Pascal. Turbo Pascal blazed and worked even on our 286 IIRC, which had minimal graphics capabilities. Even once we got a 486 TP was so lightweight compared to booting up windows that probably helped it's popularity for people who were stuck on PCs at home.
As soon as I went to college I always had access to C/C++ and that's what classes were taught in, and by Winter 95/96 we were all getting linux up and running and started having access to all the GNU stuff for doing our work.
