> Have we not realised that the future of programming languages is likely to be increasingly functional? Next to the Lisp dialects (and perhaps Haskell), Small

> Have we not realised that the future of programming languages is likely to be increasingly functional? Next to the Lisp dialects (and perhaps Haskell), Smalltalk is by far the most transparently functional language I can think of. Smalltalk is really easy to pick up if you're familiar with the lambda calculus (whether in theory, or via a Lisp or Haskell). Just think: object <-> closure/higher-order function; messages <-> functions; chaining messages <-> currying functions. The wrapping/syntactic sugar around the functional counterparts in Smalltalk is pretty transparent, by design. EDIT To expand on that, Alan Kay (the "inventor" of object-oriented programming) has said that Smalltalk is one of the only two truly object-oriented languages that he's ever seen. The other? Scheme (a Lisp)! So just because Smalltalk is "purely OO" doesn't mean it can't be as functional as a Lisp at the same time.