Java has virtually nothing in common with Smalltalk, other than in the most superficial way (things called objects exist, that work nothing alike). The closest thing to Smalltalk in serious use today is Ruby, which hews very close to Smalltalk's philosophy of message passing, though it does abandon the idea of a holistic programmable environment.
If one considers the actor model to be a natural evolution of Smalltalk's original idea of message-oriented, dynamic objects, then the BEAM might be Smalltalk's natural successor (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc). Genservers are effectively isolated green threads that communicate solely by sending one another messages, which strikes me as very close to the spirit of Smalltalk's objects.
Java has virtually nothing in common with Smalltalk, other than in the most superficial way (things called objects exist, that work nothing alike). The closest thing to Smalltalk in serious use today is Ruby, which hews very close to Smalltalk's philosophy of message passing, though it does abandon the idea of a holistic programmable environment.
If one considers the actor model to be a natural evolution of Smalltalk's original idea of message-oriented, dynamic objects, then the BEAM might be Smalltalk's natural successor (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc). Genservers are effectively isolated green threads that communicate solely by sending one another messages, which strikes me as very close to the spirit of Smalltalk's objects.