Sun's cluelessness in this story reminds me of my early experiences with Smalltalk.

In the 90's when Smalltalk was trying to break into the mainstream, some colleagues and I went to PARC to look at their windowing toolkit. I had high expectations, because these were the people who had invented object-oriented programming *and* GUIs. But I was flabbergasted at how crude their visual tools were. I don't remember specific flaws. I just remember thinking it was clear these guys had never seen NextStep. All the power and elegance and *history* of Smalltalk, and that was the best they could do?

One of my colleagues wanted to mock up a simple IB-like thing, and asked if there was any way to draw a connecting line between two windows, like IB does when you connect an outlet. They said no, it couldn't be done. Well, my colleague sat down and showed them it *could* be done, the way NextStep did it, by making "lines" out of windows one pixel wide.

It's a testament to Smalltalk's other great qualities that on balance I still loved it. NextStep and Smalltalk *both* spoiled me.