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In the 1990s, Smalltalk was poised to become a dominant programming language for the enterprise, thanks to IBM. Developers are really bad at making small talk?
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Ooooh small talk would be one of the bether choises. What we have now? VeryWeakScript_AndOthers<atseveral"languages"> 
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Uups, my original response Looks something different from what I see now....
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: was poised to become a dominant programming language
Pfft, no it wasn't.
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This article fails tell me why I should care about Smalltalk?
I guess I will just keep on ignoring it then! 
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My reply below was originally intended as a reply to this message - should give you a number of reasons.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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IBM's version of Smalltalk was insignificant - it pretty well only had one release, and that wasn't the best. The problem was that the good commercial Smalltalks just cost too much for people to take the risk - a real shame as it pioneered many of the best ideas in development.
Smalltalk-80 (that was released in 1980) already had:
* Classes as first class objects
* Methods and blocks (closures) as first class objects.
* Pervasive reflection.
* The ability to break into and inspect the state of a running system.
* The ability to select any piece of text (in a text box etc.) and evaluate it as code.
The Smalltalk community also pioneered many of the best ideas in development:
* Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development (Kent Beck wrote xUnit originally as a Smalltalk project)
* Refactoring (the Refactoring browser was written for Smalltalk).
* Design patterns (many of the original design patterns arose from this community).
Many of the luminaries of software engineering, including Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, speak of the influence Smalltalk had on their development.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Interesting to see how SmallTalk remains a kind of palladial monument in the history of programming, one which attracts enthused revivalists, as well as rabid detractors.
Richard Eng wrote in the article cited:Quote: Today, there is no real obstacle to using Smalltalk, except for ignorance.
Nice backhand, Richard; too bad you didn't score even once.
I really agree with the points made by Rob Grainger in his comments in this thread.
$mallTalk required hardware that few mere mortals could afford to buy in order to do anything significant. It was memory-intensive, and demanded uncommon graphic facilities at a time when the rasterized-text-only GUI was the norm.
It's too bad that SmallTalk, as beautiful and elegant a set of concepts ever created by remarkable people (Kay, Goldberg, Ingalls, Dahl, Nygaard et. al.), gets dis-evangelized like this.
Rob didn't mention that the MVC concept, which, imho, we're still in the "adoption phase" of, comes from the creative nexus surrounding SmallTalk.
Sometime in late 1985, I went to a meeting of the "Software Entrepeneur's Forum" in Palo Alto; a friend of mine was an evangelist for Adele Goldberg's SmallTalk company, ParcPlace (later product manager for ObjectWorks); I had met him through my interest in Lisp, when he worked for a Mac company, Expertelligence.
At that meeting, which discussed SmallTalk, there was an interesting brawl between some devotees of Forth (for whom minimizing memory use was a "commandment;" and "staying close to the hardware" was a shibboleth separating real-programmers from air-heads). The veterans of Xerox PARC didn't know what hit them, and, really didn't know how to respond: the image came to my mind of someone driving a VW Van (of that time) with someone being driven by a chauffeur in a Rolls Royce ... of those two trying to find common-ground about the topic of motoring.
I wish I had a tape-recording of that meeting ... but I think that debate is still running in prime-time today 
«The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.» Soren Kierkegaard
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Sorry - should really have called out MVC explicitly, although it did sort of go along under "Design Patterns".
I should also have mentioned that Self, effectively a prototype-based dialect of Smalltalk, introduced both prototype-based programming and getting decent performance from a VM. Indeed, Sun employed most of the team to work on the Java HotSpot VM, and its footprint can be seen in .NET and V8.
Notably, performance of Self is comparable with Java/.NET, in spite of being an entirely dynamic language. They also have the best papers I've ever read on the techniques involved: Self Bibliography[^].
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Suggestion: to see what SmallTalk is like on today's Windows OS: [^]. Dolphin is free, open-source, MIT license; the former "Professional" edition (paid) merged into the current free edition.
«The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.» Soren Kierkegaard
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I remember one guy with whom I shared my cube, in 1996, who kept on hopping jobs simply because ...
... he knew how to write 'Hello World' in SmallTalk
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'Hello, World!'
Or, if you're being really fussy...
Transcript show: 'Hello, World!'.
Its not really that hard 
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Looks like he knew more than what the interviewer knew.
Yes, I am exaggerating
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Smalltalk is a good example of theory vs practice. Look at almost every new computer language and you'll find wonderful theory combined with some real practical problems. Crappy debuggers usually being the biggest sticking point.
Another common problem, especially with Smalltalk, is the flow of reading and formatting the code. This is often dismissed by the super-nerds.
It seems to me that Ada and C With Classes had far more real and lasting influence than Smalltalk.
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Apple introduced an iPhone with a smaller screen on Monday called the iPhone SE. Smaller, smaller, greener, yawner
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For sure they used a lot of wrapping foil to make it look like new...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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It isnt so small, but "only" 4 inches. I guess it will be a big, big hit ![Java | [Coffee]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/coffee.gif)
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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Now if only Samsung would make a smaller version of the Galaxy 7 Edge...
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Microsoft's new pitch to developers may soon be 'Visual Studio plus Azure,' rather than 'Visual Studio plus Windows.' Dark clouds rolling in
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A new operating system written in Mozilla's Rust language shows there's plenty to be accomplished by thinking outside the Linux box Does it come with Win10 upgrade requests?
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Password hygiene is actually deteriorating, despite all the recent media attention on data breaches, according to a new survey Another 67% have passwords that aren't worth paying for
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Another 67% have passwords that aren't worth paying for
... and the last 6% forgot to update the postit on their monitor after the last mandatory change and are now locked out.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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In the world of the Internet, technology is constantly changing. The SMTP technology behind email, however, has not changed much since it was first released a very long tine ago. Tbbq yhpx jvgu gung
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I, while working for a company that had lots of security-minded customers for its other products, was instructed to come up with a secure corporate email system that had nothing to do with SMTP. I did so, and the first people interested in it were the FBI. They didn't want a back door; they wanted to use it as a regular customer so their own emails couldn't be hacked. Before this deal was completed the company closed down after the president of the company fled the country with both the IRS and the FBI in hot pursuit (on unrelated matters). I wonder how it would have turned out if this latter incident hadn't happened.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Man, that's a hell of a story!
When is the movie coming out?!
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