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>Smalltalk was a crazy-productive programming environment in the '90s, I did some in college and then professionally in the early 2000s. Easily the most enjoya
by poulsbohemian 6y ago
>Smalltalk was a crazy-productive programming environment in the '90s,
I did some in college and then professionally in the early 2000s. Easily the most enjoyable and productive tool I used in my software development career. While I understand HNs fascination with functional languages and programming, I can't help but think it is very unfortunate that Smalltalk and it's OOP has been left as a kind of evolutionary dead end.
- int_19h 6y agoThe modern fascination with "functional" is, in part, because we have redefined "functional" to apply to basically any language with first-class anonymous functions that are closures - witness all the talk about "functional JS" and how it's "almost like Lisp". By that criteria, Smalltalk was one of the first industrial-strength functional languages. In fact, it's better than most, because its closures close over not just the variables, but also over the execution context (i.e. a closure can execute a non-local return from the function in which it was created).
- lispm 6y agoThough, early Smalltalk did not support lexical closures.