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  • Somewhat related, I’ve been digesting this long but fascinating talk about the even earlier history of OOP, going all the way back to the 1950s. It’s from the perspective of someone who questions some early decisions about what OOP would become. Implementation inheritance, of course, which iirc is something Kay calls out as more accidental than principled language design decision in this paper. But also things like the physical arrangement of data in memory, and how all of this affects what kinds of problems will be easier or harder to solve.

    https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

    by bunderbunder
  • What is really surprising to me is that Smalltalk was originally targeted as an educational language for children:

    https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/#smalltalkAnd...

    In this way, it was the older brother of Logo, but with a core object scaffold that was far more influential.

    by chasil
  • Whenever this story (and all the related stories about PARC) re-surface, I am (writing now in late 2026) mostly sad about the incredible language that should have 'won' .. well .. everything!

    The term 'footgun' unfortunately matches all too well: something so great, so powerful yet most of the time, even in the hands of well-intended folks, proceeds to shoot oneself in the foot. I was for more than a decade a professional Smalltalk developer (Telecommunications, Financial/Derivatives) but we were replaced by technically inferior systems, mostly Java, JavaScript and even VisualBasic. The HR person at the Financial company explained (after my exit interview!) that for the cost of a single Smalltalk developer, they could hire 4 or 5 lesser experienced programmers (less cognizant of how systems actually worked!). The HR folks preferred these hires: more selection, cheaper . etc. Sigh!

    Am I a horrible person to enjoy so much (schadenfreude!) the upcoming AI/LLM footgun massacre?

    by mwnorman2
  • Most beautiful computer syntax of the world.

    Smalltalk is conceptual-centric in ways that are remarkably deep.

    Pity our hardware architectures couldn't give us better hardware support.

    Not that they didn't tried:

    - Burroughs B5000 (1961)

    - Intel iAPX 432 (1981–1986)

    - BiiN project (1985–1990)

    - Intel i960

    - Rekursiv (Linn)

    - jHISC ~2005

    - MOOSS 2003

    - Structural Object Processor (Xilinx)

    by sebastianconcpt
  • I had the pleasure of learning OOP with Smalltalk at university back in 2002. They used it as the second language (Lisp was the first) to teach the principles. I really loved it. What I admired most was that you “lived” in your program. Later on, Java (1.4) was taught, but coming from Smalltalk, everything felt cumbersome, especially working with collections. Of all the languages I’ve used in my professional career so far, only Ruby has sparked the same joy.
    by jttnr
  • I was never a Smalltalk programmer ((although I did once debug a fairly simple Smalltalk module by looking at the printout of the code). But I did work for awhile in an OOPL built on top of Smalltalk. That project died because it was too slow, but also because the Smalltalk vendor the project used went out of business, leaving an incompatible and expensive Smalltalk as the only one left standing. (At least that's what I was told.)

    Today the project is written in C++, which had the advantages of being free and fast (and as far as I can tell, incomprehensible and prone to crashing).

    by mcswell
  • Some prior discussions on this:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062369 - April 20, 2022 (45 comments)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012425 - Nov 7, 2020 (28 comments)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913668 - Sept 4, 2018 (69 comments)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9907556 - July 18, 2015 (5 comments)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588316 - May 22, 2015 (5 comments)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926141 - June 21, 2014 (10 comments)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311282 - May 1, 2010 (17 comments)

    by Jtsummers
  • A lot of people don't know that Smalltalk heavily influenced NeXTSTEP and Objective-C. You'll see a lot of it in Interface Builder->Project Builder->XCode with the GUI serialization (and of course Obj-C message passing and general dynamic nature).

    This is a good history:

    https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-deep-history-of-your-ap...

    by slowin

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