Also, you could share Java code, or entire libraries or applications, by posting some files on a website. You already had the files, and someone downloading them could use them straight away. To share Smalltalk code on a website, you would go through the file out / file in process, which was considerably clunkier.

Also, i don't think Smalltalks of the time had namespaces, which also makes sharing code harder to get right. Java's reverse-DNS package naming is a surprisingly important innovation.