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Surprised this doesn’t mention Smalltalk’s huge influence on two major living languages: Objective-C and Ruby, both of which use the Smalltalk object model, dyn

Surprised this doesn’t mention Smalltalk’s huge influence on two major living languages: Objective-C and Ruby, both of which use the Smalltalk object model, dynamic message passing paradigm and all, which is very different from how most other OOP implementations work. In the long run: Objective-C will be gone in 20 years, but Ruby won’t. Outside of ObjC interop facilities, Swift will retain some of Objective-C’s Smalltalk heritage, as one of many influences.

alwillis 4y ago
Agreed. Leaving out Objective-C using Smalltalk’s object model is a huge oversight.
- hosh 4y ago
  The writing of history (historiography) is not meant to be a minutely detailed account of everything that happened. History is a narrative, a story about how we came to be here, and sees the past with a particular lens. I think this particular history was meant to bring appreciation of influential yet obscure and niche languages for the current generation of developers and software engineers. I doubt it was meant to be definitive or exhaustive. In fact, at the very bottom of the article, there is a link to the Encyclopedia of Programming Languages with over 8000 entries. The influence of Smalltalk’s “everything is an object” on Objective-C and Ruby is probably in there somewhere. Disclosure: I wrote Ruby professionally for over ten years, and learned the basics of OOP with ObjC back in the 90s. I get the significance of Smalltalk’s object model.
  - alwillis 4y ago
    > The writing of history (historiography) is not meant to be a minutely detailed account of everything that happened. History is a narrative, a story about how we came to be here, and sees the past with a particular lens. Of course I get all of that; however, the author also chronicled the influence of these languages and certainly Objective-C use of Smalltalk's object model, a language that provided macOS and iOS such a competitive advantage for many years, it's probably worth a mention.

alwillis 4y ago

Agreed. Leaving out Objective-C using Smalltalk’s object model is a huge oversight.

hosh 4y ago
The writing of history (historiography) is not meant to be a minutely detailed account of everything that happened. History is a narrative, a story about how we came to be here, and sees the past with a particular lens. I think this particular history was meant to bring appreciation of influential yet obscure and niche languages for the current generation of developers and software engineers. I doubt it was meant to be definitive or exhaustive. In fact, at the very bottom of the article, there is a link to the Encyclopedia of Programming Languages with over 8000 entries. The influence of Smalltalk’s “everything is an object” on Objective-C and Ruby is probably in there somewhere. Disclosure: I wrote Ruby professionally for over ten years, and learned the basics of OOP with ObjC back in the 90s. I get the significance of Smalltalk’s object model.
- alwillis 4y ago
  > The writing of history (historiography) is not meant to be a minutely detailed account of everything that happened. History is a narrative, a story about how we came to be here, and sees the past with a particular lens. Of course I get all of that; however, the author also chronicled the influence of these languages and certainly Objective-C use of Smalltalk's object model, a language that provided macOS and iOS such a competitive advantage for many years, it's probably worth a mention.