Denis Defreyne wants to give this talkSmalltalk: a lost relic
Smalltalk has been the inspiration for many object-oriented languages. Ruby, too, has its roots in Smalltalk—I even find Ruby to me the most Smalltalk-like language I’ve ever used.
These days, Smalltalk is all but forgotten. This is a shame, because the Smalltalk environment had powerful features that are rarely found in development environments these days.
In this talk, I’ll give a brief tour of Smalltalk and its development environment, show its strengths (so you know what you’re missing out on) and its weaknesses (to reassure that Ruby is still a good choice).
I used to be a professional Smalltalk developer for almost three years, so I know what I’m talking about. Or at least knew!