It's 1980, and the world of computing feels like it’s at a crossroads. While most of my colleagues are still debating the merits of structured programming in Pascal or C, I've been fortunate enough to get a glimpse of something truly revolutionary: Smalltalk-80. Coming out of Xerox PARC, this isn't just a language; it's an entire philosophy.
Everything is an Object
In Smalltalk, the mantra is simple: everything is an object. Numbers, strings, even the classes themselves-they’re all objects. You don’t "call functions"; you "send messages." It sounds like a semantic distinction, but it fundamentally changes how you architect a system.
"Sending a message to an object"
3 + 4. "The message + with argument 4 is sent to the object 3"
"Creating a simple class"
Object subclass: #Counter
instanceVariableNames: 'count'
classVariableNames: ''
poolDictionaries: ''
category: 'Examples'
Counter >> initialize
count := 0.
Counter >> increment
count := count + 1.
The beauty of Smalltalk-80 is its consistency. The environment itself is written in Smalltalk. If you don't like how the debugger works, you can just browse its source code and change it while the system is running. It's the most "live" environment I've ever experienced.
The Bitmapped Revolution
Smalltalk isn't just about the code; it's about the interface. Seeing a high-resolution bitmapped display with windows, menus, and a mouse pointer is like seeing into the future. It makes the command-line interfaces we're used to feel archaic. The concept of "Model-View-Controller" (MVC) started here, and it’s a brilliant way to decouple our data from its visual representation.
A Glimpse of the Future
I suspect we won't all be using Smalltalk-80 in ten years-the hardware requirements are just too steep for most companies right now. But the ideas? The ideas are going to infect every other language that comes after. Polymorphism, inheritance, and dynamic binding are too powerful to ignore. We're moving away from telling the computer how to do things and towards a world where we describe what objects should interact.
Smalltalk-80 is the purest vision of that future, and once you've tasted it, it's hard to go back.
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