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Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

Richard Kenneth Eng
ITNEXT
Published in
3 min readJan 9, 2020

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Of all the programming languages in the world, Smalltalk is, by far, the easiest one to evangelize. Why is that?

First, Smalltalk has a wonderful historical legacy. It has contributed an enormous amount to the software industry, to computer science, and to programming language design. It pioneered the language virtual machine and JIT compilation. It created the world’s first modern IDE. It made live coding easily accessible. It introduced the MVC architectural pattern. It was largely responsible for TDD (test-driven development). It pioneered the development of object databases. It gave us the first refactoring browser. It was instrumental in developing GUI and WYSIWYG.

It influenced the design of Objective-C, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python, Groovy, Scala, Dart, and other languages.

It popularized object-oriented programming (whereas Simula 67 academically introduced the concept of classes and objects). Remember the famous August 1981 cover of BYTE magazine?

Second, Alan Kay and his group at Xerox PARC are legendary. Alan Kay’s vision was extraordinary. His object-oriented philosophy was brilliant. It was far superior to the philosophy espoused by people like Bjarne Stroustrup.

Alan Kay on the early days of Smalltalk (jump to 2:17)

Third, Smalltalk has a wonderful track record. It actually achieved a significant measure of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. It was adopted by IBM for their VisualAge enterprise initiative. It was used by many prominent customers, including the U.S. joint military, JP Morgan, Orient Overseas Container Lines, Desjardins, UBS, Texas Instruments, Telecom Argentina, BMW, and Siemens AG.

It has a very significant commercial vendor presence which enterprise companies appreciate. Look at Cincom (VisualWorks), Instantiations (VA Smalltalk), and GemTalk Systems (GemStone/S). It has significant corporate sponsorship from the Pharo Consortium.

Fourth, Smalltalk has statistical evidence (in the Namcook Analytics study by Capers Jones) to support the claim of enormous programmer productivity. This is consistent with much anecdotal evidence for the same claim.

Fifth, Smalltalk has a rich family of languages like Pharo, Squeak, Cuis Smalltalk, Dolphin Smalltalk (optimized for Windows), GNU Smalltalk (for command line lovers), Amber (transpiles to JS), Hoot Smalltalk (JVM support), VisualWorks, VA Smalltalk, and GemStone/S (high-performance object databases) that can satisfy a myriad of needs.

Moreover, Pharo is the fastest evolving and innovating Smalltalk in history! It has remade itself in just under a decade.

Sixth, Smalltalk makes object-oriented programming very easy, much easier than in C++, Java, C#, and others. Smalltalk is supremely simple and easy to learn. Its complete syntax fits on a post card. You can learn all of Smalltalk’s syntax within 15 minutes!

Seventh, Smalltalk is remarkably versatile. You can do back-end web with Seaside and Teapot frameworks. You can do front-end web with Amber and PharoJS transpiled languages. You can do mobile with Cordova/PhoneGap. You can do data science with PolyMath library, Roassal data visualization, and Moose data analytics platform. You can do machine learning with TensorFlow and Keras. You can do IoT with PharoThings. You can do robotics with PhaROS. You can do virtual reality. You can even script the Unreal game engine!

Roassal demonstration
virtual reality demonstration
Unreal game engine demonstration

In other words, Smalltalk provides a huge stockpile of ammunition. You can fire salvo after salvo after salvo.

What other language can be as easily evangelized? Clojure? Crystal? Dart? Elixir? Golang? Haskell? Julia? Kotlin? Nim? Racket? Rust? TypeScript? Nope. Not even close.

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