However, it will be remebered as yet another language created by a hardware vendor. A member of the audience contributed his notes of the actual panel. They appear here with modest editing. Java won for marketing reasons, not technical. Smalltalk community needs to be more open to what Smalltalk can be used for.
Web browsers are dead.
Instead of using Web Browsers with their really boring interfaces, we need to create better interfaces and merely look to the web to provide data. The web moves very fast. What you would normally deliver in a year, you must be able to deliver in 0.2 years on the web. All maps well to 3-tier architecture. But I'm sure I need it.