How learning Smalltalk can make you a better developer

Photo credit: Fancycrave1.

Smalltalk is widely perceived as an old, moribund language , an antique from a bygone era. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Smalltalk is still very relevant. It’s an excellent instructional language for teaching programming to people who have no technical background. It’s a superlative prototyping language for startups and an industrial-strength enterprise language used by both big and small businesses across the globe. There are good reasons to consider using modern Smalltalk today since much has changed in recent years to improve its prospects.

You don’t have to use the 45-year-old programming language in production today but try coding something in it and see how it feels. It should feel familiar because Smalltalk’s implementation of the object-oriented (OO) paradigm is so excellent that it has influenced an entire generation of OO languages, such as Objective-C, Python, Ruby, Clos, Php 5, Perl 6, Erlang, Groovy, Scala, Dart, Swift, and so on.

By learning Smalltalk, you’ll understand how all of these useful features in today’s OO languages came to be and gain a big edge in your programming skills.

What did Smalltalk give us?

Smalltalk has a rich legacy in the software industry. Just look at this list of features and technologies it contributed:

The language virtual machine

Smalltalk introduced the world to the language virtual machine (VM), which allows software to be platform-independent. This is the same technology that underpins Java (JVM) and .NET, as well as Android (Dalvik).

JIT compilation

Smalltalk also pioneered JIT or just-in-time compilation, a technique for dramatically improving the performance of bytecode software such as Java.

First modern IDE

From Smalltalk came the first modern IDE or integrated development environment, which included a text editor, a system or class browser, an object or property inspector, and a debugger. This led to the many IDEs that developers favor today, such as Visual Studio, Xcode, and Intellij Idea.

Personally, I think that none of these IDEs can compare with Smalltalk’s IDE in simplicity, elegance, and velocity of development. The original is still the best!

But how can learning Smalltalk make me a better developer?

Image-based approach to programming

Everything is an object