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by fjl 6459 days ago
smalltalk is one of the most influential languages i have ever used. after reading about it in a crappy computer magazine, downloading squeak and learning how to build things i virtually spent the rest of the night wondering, laughing about the simplistic beauty of its clean design. its extensibility and the duck typing principle, as well as object orientation in general, are key concepts of many dynamic languages.

apart from seaside, which is nice anyway, even rather 'primitive' things like graphical user interfaces were invented in smalltalk. the 'extraordinary productivity', as bowkett is putting it, may probably be the reason for that.

so if smalltalk is cool again by now, why bother? looks like its comeback will bear resemblance to the lisp comeback in about 1999.
1 comments
silentbicycle 6459 days ago
I think its implementation via virtual machine was quite influential, too. While the graphics in Smalltalk-80 look painfully dated, it's quite clear the language was far ahead of its time, and many languages people encounter these days could be considered third-generation knockoffs of Smalltalk (often with an Algol parent). It has a really clean conceptual design, and it gets quite a bit of expressive power from being able to pass around lazily evaluated blocks of code.

In hindsight I'm not sure that its design as a fully self-contained / relatively isolated system is a good idea, but the core semantics of the language make a lot of sense. OO is a better paradigm for some problems than others, but Smalltalk has a far more sensible vision of OO than those grafted onto C's type system, and I would recommend people play with it over reading endless rehashing of _Design Patterns_. (Smalltalk is to OO as Haskell is to FP.)

Also:

> The questioner also adds:

> "For the record: I'm a Ruby guy with little to no experience in Smalltalk, but I'm starting to wonder why."

> The answer: because you look to anonymous crowds on social networking sites for approval when you should just follow your curiousity and see where it leads.

Burn.

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