Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence?
Introduction
The August 1978 issue of Byte Magazine had a language feature that included a small picture of the "Land Of Small Talk", perched on a tower amid Fortran Ocean, to the south of Pascal's Triangle, North of Lisp Jungle, and East of the Basic Sea.. The following text, associated with a description of the language, uncannily describes the state of Smalltalk both past and present.
"Traveling upward through heavy seas, we come to pinnacle, a snow white island rising like an ivory tower out of the surrounding shark infested waters. Here we find the fantastic kingdom of Smalltalk, where great and magical things happen. But alas... the craggy aloofness of the kingdom of Smalltalk keeps it out of the mainstream of things."
(Carl Helmers, Byte Magazine, August 1978, p. 18)
At the Smalltalk Solutions Conference in Toronto, Ontario on April 26, 2006, Georg Heeg organized a talk around what he termed "The Smalltalk Paradox", as enumerated in the quotation above. Nostalgic as always for the full-force return of Smalltalk to the fore of modern Object-Oriented software development, I listened attentively.
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