This depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to broaden your understanding of programming [0] then learning Smalltalk is worthwhile. A lot of ideas fr

This depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to broaden your understanding of programming [0] then learning Smalltalk is worthwhile. A lot of ideas from Smalltalk have bled into the mainstream but it's interesting to see how a live image, integrated system functions. If you think Smalltalk will be the next mainstream language, and you want to be ahead of the curve, then I wouldn't bother. That's highly unlikely. It's most suited for limited, self-contained and presentation heavy use cases. These still exist but they're not where the industry is or is likely to go. And it's hard to see pure OO coming back into fashion any time soon. And as to perfection, well, as with all these things, it depends on what your building. It takes an inordinate amount of discipline to write a system that works well at scale. Even worse if you want to run distributed. It's really not suited for that. But if you keep in its sweet spot, it can be very pleasant to develop in. [0] I'm assuming from your question you've had mostly mainstream language experience. If you're an expert Common Lisp programmer then this probably doesn't apply so much.