
Smalltalk: Complaints And Opportunities - sant0sk1
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/10/smalltalk-complaints-and-opportunities.html
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fjl
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.

~~~
silentbicycle
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._

