I'm actually speaking from experience here. I used Smalltalk during the resurgence of the mid-nineties, and I programmed professionally in it at two different

I'm actually speaking from experience here. I used Smalltalk during the resurgence of the mid-nineties, and I programmed professionally in it at two different companies. The first was where I learned the language, and it was staffed by the type of programmer that did not really understand the interactivity of the system. They really did write a lot of stuff that looked like C, translated into Smalltalk syntax. Not completely, there were some objects, but they did not really get it. I had to learn the interactivity stuff from people at the other company, which was staffed by people who'd been Smalltalk programmers for quite a while, and also people who had experience with other dynamic languages, particularly Common Lisp. That was where I really learned how to do the interactive stuff I mentioned above. You might consider Smalltalk niche now, but in the short period of time before Java came around, it looked like Smalltalk was the future of enterprise computing. That is the period I am specifically talking about.