...and along the way mentions my favourite language, Smalltalk:-)Â
"A decade ago I was talking to my old friend Tom Hadfield at OOPSLA 96. Java's rise was apparent and it was clear that Smalltalk's future was doomed. Despite my love of Smalltalk I was pretty sanguine. I felt that Java gave people enough of what they needed; while it wasn't quite as nice as Smalltalk it was enough of an improvement over C++, particularly with memory management, for me to be happy with it. Tom disagreed, he felt there was something fundamentally different about the expressiveness of Smalltalk, the way you could better capture the intention of what you were doing directly in your code - closing the gap between domain knowledge and programming.
In the intervening years I've come to the view that Tom was right after all. After several years in curly brace land, Ruby reminded me of what I was missing. There's a clarity to reading Ruby code that just makes it an easier medium to work with, despite the inferior tooling. I'm way more sympathetic to the Smalltalk holdouts than I felt then, even though I haven't felt inclined to open an image in anger for a long time."
MF Bliki: OneLanguage