27 Facts About Smalltalk

ANSI Smalltalk was ratified in 1998 and represents the standard version of Smalltalk.

Smalltalk took second place for "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2017, but it was not among the 26 most loved programming languages of the 2018 survey.

The unqualified word Smalltalk is often used to indicate the Smalltalk-80 language, the first version to be made publicly available and created in 1980.

Smalltalk was the product of research led by Alan Kay at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; Alan Kay designed most of the early Smalltalk versions, Adele Goldberg wrote most of the documentation, and Dan Ingalls implemented most of the early versions.

The first version, termed Smalltalk-71, was created by Kay in a few mornings on a bet that a programming language based on the idea of message passing inspired by Simula could be implemented in "a page of code".

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Smalltalk-80 added metaclasses, to help maintain the "everything is an object" paradigm by associating properties and behavior with individual classes, and even primitives such as integer and boolean values (for example, to support different ways to create instances).

Smalltalk-80 was the first language variant made available outside of PARC, first as Smalltalk-80 Version 1, given to a small number of firms) and universities (UC Berkeley) for peer review and implementing on their platforms.

ANSI Smalltalk has been the standard language reference since 1998.

Cincom has backed Smalltalk strongly, releasing multiple new versions of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio each year since 1999.

IBM has 'end of life'd VisualAge Smalltalk having in the late 1990s decided to back Java instead and it is, as of 2005, supported by Instantiations, Inc who renamed the product VA Smalltalk and continue to release new versions yearly.

GNU Smalltalk is a free software implementation of a derivative of Smalltalk-80 from the GNU project.

Pharo Smalltalk is a fork of Squeak oriented toward research and use in commercial environments.

Smalltalk was one of many object-oriented programming languages based on Simula.

Smalltalk was one of the most popular languages for agile software development methods, rapid application development or prototyping, and software design patterns.

The highly productive environment provided by Smalltalk platforms made them ideal for rapid, iterative development.

Smalltalk emerged from a larger program of Advanced Research Projects Agency funded research that in many ways defined the modern world of computing.

Smalltalk environments were often the first to develop what are now common object-oriented software design patterns.

The powerful built-in debugging and object inspection tools that came with Smalltalk environments set the standard for all the integrated development environments, starting with Lisp Machine environments, that came after.

Smalltalk is a structurally reflective system which structure is defined by Smalltalk-80 objects.

Smalltalk-80 provides computational reflection, the ability to observe the computational state of the system.

From its origins as a language for children of all ages, standard Smalltalk syntax uses punctuation in a manner more like English than mainstream coding languages.

Many Smalltalk dialects implement additional syntaxes for other objects, but the ones above are the essentials supported by all.

Smalltalk originally accepted this left-arrow as the only assignment operator.

Smalltalk adopts by default a dynamic dispatch and single dispatch strategy.

Smalltalk images are similar to core dumps and can provide the same functionality as core dumps, such as delayed or remote debugging with full access to the program state at the time of error.

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Everything in Smalltalk-80 is available for modification from within a running program.

Smalltalk programs are usually compiled to bytecode, which is then interpreted by a virtual machine or dynamically translated into machine-native code.