I never had the opportunity to write an application in Smalltalk.

I was a fortran programmer back in the late 80’s. Exposure to Unix had opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities in software. And I was a regular at the Sunnyvale Computer Literacy, trying to learn more about those possibilities. One of those possibilities was Smalltalk, or more precisely Little Smalltalk. I read the book. I obtained the source on 9 track tape. And I surreptitiously installed it on the superminicomputer at work.

And that was my introduction to the wonderful world of objects. They say that “You can write a Fortran program in any language” And I’ve certainly seen my share of Java code that is best described as C with garbage collection. In Smalltalk, everything is an object. And with its devotion to that mantra, Smalltalk was perhaps the best language to start object oriented programming.