Smalltalk enthusiast for twenty years here. I jumped out of the balloon almost ten years ago now and sold my soul to the mediocrity of pragmatic polyglotism. I

Smalltalk enthusiast for twenty years here. I jumped out of the balloon almost ten years ago now and sold my soul to the mediocrity of pragmatic polyglotism. I miss Smalltalk. I miss it's clean syntax. Were there times when keyword syntax got odd, yes. But less so than list base call syntax (and even weirder with the hybrid list(keyword) keyword messages. Was everything's done via messages all the way down always the bees knees. There were some edge cases (zip?) were it was difficult to figure out where the behavior really should be bound. But the trade off was simplicity and consistency. None of this why is len() a function and upper() a method nonsense. I miss the simple syntax and pervasive use of Smalltalk closures. I miss the tooling. The RefactoringBrowser was one of the most amazing code environments out there. I found code faster. I authored code faster. I changed code faster. What have I appreciated as I've wandered through the wreckage of modern in use systems? Namespaces. There were some Smalltalk experiments here, but they were late and varied. My favorite was probably that of Smalltalk/X. I mostly like pythons namespaces: "we should do more of those". Not a fan of pythons shadowing rules though and have never decided whether it's namespaces and shadowing are codependent or independent. I kind of like typing. I remember I was skeptical of Strongtalk typing at first, but I've come to appreciate that style of annotation. Where typing always seems to break down for me is containers. I am just not a fan of generics. They are to typing what preprocessers end up becoming, a sort of "deep state Illuminati" of the program. Gilad hinted at a proposed solution to this a while back, but I never saw a follow up. And of course cheep tooling. I don't mind paying for things. But Smalltalk business model was about platform entrapment. There was no incremental. No choice. You had to choose the whole party up front.