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Apparently, the earliest versions of Smalltalk as designed by Alan Kay didn't have inheritance. It was only added later on, seemingly in the name of performance

by Sakos 2y ago

Apparently, the earliest versions of Smalltalk as designed by Alan Kay didn't have inheritance. It was only added later on, seemingly in the name of performance: > After significant revisions which froze some aspects of execution semantics to gain performance (by adopting a Simula-like class inheritance model of execution), Smalltalk-76 was created. This system had a development environment featuring most of the now familiar tools, including a class library code browser/editor. Smalltalk-80 added metaclasses, to help maintain the "everything is an object" (except variables) paradigm by associating properties and behavior with individual classes, and even primitives such as integer and Boolean values (for example, to support different ways to create instances). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#History https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/989 https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/989

igouy 2y ago
If you'd like to know about the early history of Smalltalk, then I'd recommend Alan Kay's "The Early History of Smalltalk" (in this case say pages 19-31) [pdf] https://web.archive.org/web/20230503050530/http://www.metaobject.com/papers/Smallhistory.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230503050530/http://www.metaob... "… since things can be done with a dynamic language that are difficult with a statically compiled one, I just decided to leave inheritance out as a feature in Smalltalk-72, knowing that we could simulate it back using Smalltalk's LISPlike flexibility. … By the time Smalltalk-76 came along, Dan Ingalls had come up with a scheme that was Simula-like in its semantics but could be incrementally changed on the fly to be in accord with our goals of close interaction." p31