So Smalltalk is one of those languages that gets thrown around a lot in discussions about languages. After all, it is where the object oriented paradigm pretty much originated (although I suppose Simula sort of had a version of that without that explicit name), and so many languages have drawn on it for inspiration, even if most have gone a completely different way in realizing the OO idea.

As historical reference, Smalltalk is big, no doubt about that. And as a language it is pretty clever. Dynamic and self reflective, it just runs the whole time, objects are live and can be altered on-the-fly with a change to the code.

But what is Smalltalk today? Is it worth learning? From what I can see, and I should say I haven’t really spent that much time looking, it seems pretty dead. There is Squeak, where you get the whole image and you do everything inside the virtual machine. From what I understand this is the way you’re supposed to use Smalltalk. But frankly I’m not interested in an application that only runs inside a VM. For the same reason that noone really wants to run apps in VirtualBox or VMware.

Most of the Squeak tutorials seem to be 404. And I have yet to see anything that’s really interesting. In the end, programming is about programs, and without shiny programs to show off, what is left for us? The Smalltalk website, sporting a 1997 kind of look, has a list of apps on show. Based on that it’s hard to get excited about the language.

Okay, so there is something called Seaside, a web framework. And I can kind of see how it’s cool to have a web application that has to run 24/7, and meanwhile you can do live updates to the objects. But I’m not shopping for a web framework anyway, and there’s a ton of them already.

So is Smalltalk merely a historical curiosity at this point?