Reflection: Smalltalk’s Most Enduring Idea? by Brian Foote
Channel: FAST - Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk
Date: 2017-11-21

It’s no secret that so many of the ideas that were incubated in the Smalltalk images and community a generation ago have had an influence on language design and programming technology in general that reaches far beyond that of Smalltalk itself. From objects themselves, first-class closures (think lambas), inheritance, dynamic types, virtual machines, and windowed GUIs, to name just a few, Smalltalk’s fingerprints are ubiquitous. Yet a case can be made that Smalltalk’s vision of a highly dynamic language built of objects themselves, able to manipulate metadata as easily as any other kind of data, has had a reach that has transformed the contemporary programming landscape in ways that might not be immediately evident. This talk will explore just how pervasive these ideas have become.