Smalltalk

Since learning Smalltalk at KTH in around 1994 - we used VisualWorks 1.0 IIRC - I have been deeply in love with both the language, its mindset and the community with all its diversity. During many years I was very active in the Squeak community and I have also been using Pharo for various development tasks.

Today in 2019 I would say Pharo is the leading open source Smalltalk dialect, sharing lots of resources with its ancestor, Squeak, especially the Cog VM , these days going under the name OpenSmalltalk , that enables Pharo and Squeak to still be competitive alternatives.

The elegance of Smalltalk, through its careful design and very powerful toolset - still today makes it a compelling tool for many tasks. The Design Principles Behind Smalltalk -article from Byte magazine 1981 is a must read for anyone seriously interested in programming languages.

Good Design: A system should be built with a minimum set of unchangeable parts; those parts should be as general as possible; and all parts of the system should be held in a uniform framework. — Dan Ingalls, Byte magazine 1981