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SmallTalk wasn’t just a language; it was a philosophy of the human-computer relationship. At its heart was the idea the computers should be user-malleable: reshapable by each person to be the machine they wanted it to be.

SmallTalk’s impact is hard to overestimate. Most famously, along with CLU and Simula, it gave us objects and OOP — not just in the narrow mid-80s “everything is an object!” sense, but in the broader sense of interface-implementation separation that groups related state and behavior into a tidy abstraction. Its fingerprints are alllll oooover modern programming.

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