Smalltalk remains my all time favorite language. I started programming in the 1960s, with BASIC and FORTRAN (FORTRAN II, in fact, from McCracken's famous "Guide"), and before I quit coding professionally, implemented production systems in more than two dozen different languages. Wrote the most lines of code in Java, but the most interesting systems in Fortran, Pascal, Object Pascal (and one in Concurrent Pascal). Liked LISP least of all, followed closely by C++ and COBOL (although APL would probably be at the bottom, had anything I did in that strange elixir ever reach production - none did), but I loved Smalltalk. Unfortunately, Smalltalk arrived to too much hype before it's (potential) time, and was crippled as production language by it's image based development and deployment methodology. A truly elegant and sweet language coupled to a really awful engineering paradigm.
Thinking back on all this, I am astonished once again at how much has happened in computing in my lifetime (I am older than FORTRAN, e.g., so essentially all code every compiled has been compiled in my lifetime, unless you want to count Autocoder macros as compiled code).
Thinking back on all this, I am astonished once again at how much has happened in computing in my lifetime (I am older than FORTRAN, e.g., so essentially all code every compiled has been compiled in my lifetime, unless you want to count Autocoder macros as compiled code).