

The Revenge of Smalltalk - dhenrich
http://news.squeak.org/2009/06/02/the-revenge-of-smalltalk/

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silentbicycle
People may vote this up because of fondness for Smalltalk, but there's not
really any content in the linked article unless you're in/around London.

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tialys
Having recently discovered smalltalk from a seasoned developer (with quite a
personality to match!), I've come to realize it's an amazing language, and
certainly not dead. It's got some very interesting applications in finance,
and other high traffic fields, and it's got some really neat tricks that you
can carry over to other languages as well. I still don't totally understand
the notion that it is dead. In fact, I'd say it might be time to start
learning it.

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cwp
I guess "dead" is a relative term. At one time, Smalltalk seemed poised to be
the next big thing in enterprise software. The Smalltalk vendors completely
blew that opportunity and Java became the OO language of choice. There's still
a significant amount of Smalltalk in banking, insurance and other big custom-
software installations, but mostly it's a niche language now.

I think the "Smalltalk is dead" meme comes from all the ex-Smalltalkers out
there. At one point they worked on some enterprise project in Smalltalk, but
then switched over to Java when that became fashionable. They remember
Smalltalk fondly, but won't use it for anything "real" anymore.

With the rise of the internet, niche languages are a lot more viable than they
used to be, and so there's a small but vibrant community around the surviving
Smalltalk implementations.

~~~
silentbicycle
I'm not sure how _directly_ useful a Smalltalk runtime is, these days, but
Smalltalk _the language_ has several really good ideas in it that are just
waiting to get brushed off and taken for a ride.

Of course, so few programmers seem to care about ideas from more than five
years ago that there are tons of such gems hiding in plain sight.

