I'm of a similar opinion (having been a Smalltalk developer in the 1990s boom) but I think it's worth looking at for modern programmers. I wouldn't use it for

I'm of a similar opinion (having been a Smalltalk developer in the 1990s boom) but I think it's worth looking at for modern programmers. I wouldn't use it for anything myself any more, but for me it's a nice way to get the flavour of the work being done in the AI community and at Xerox Parc in those days. Like a history book you can crawl into rather than just experience vicariously. One thing I do find interesting is that the programmers who usually come up as "legendary" in this context were usually just better than average guys who ended up in the right place at the right time. A lot of their code is still running in the Cincom VisualWorks product and not all of it is gold.