One of the VPs I worked with at the computer company where I was employed tried to talk me into starting a company with him to apply Smalltalk to the enterprise market, but I hadn't yet been bitten by the startup bug. I have many fond memories of talking programming theory over ribs and coleslaw at a little run-down barbecue joint in Palo Alto. Living in Silicon Valley at the time, I got to know the designers of Smaltalk, who later spun off ParcPlace Systems, in an attempt to commercialize Smalltalk outside of Xerox's corporate stodginess. I only dabbled in Smalltalk, mostly to get to know it. Many of today's top languages, including Java, Python, and Ruby, were highly influenced by Smalltalk.Īlso: Okay, so ChatGPT just debugged my code.

It also was one of the first languages that made active use of a GUI-based interactive programming environment. It incorporated some of Simula's innovations in object-oriented programming and went further. It was developed at Xerox PARC, the same research lab that influenced the development of the mouse and windowed environments.

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET Smalltalk Prolog is a fun language, but it's not Rust.

C++ code writer