Last time, we talked about Perl as an influence on Ruby, this time, we’ll talk about the other major influence on Ruby: Smalltalk.
Smalltalk had a different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk’s syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.
Also unlike Perl, I spent a good couple of years working in Smalltalk, and it is one of my favorite languages that I’ll never likely use in anger again.
(A Personal) History of Smalltalk
Smalltalk originated in the same Xerox PARC team that invented the windowed interface, ethernet, and the laser printer, and who knows what else, they may have invented ice cream and rainbows.
There’s a whole story about what project Smalltalk was invented to be a part of, and a whole alternate history of computing and how people interact with computers that we are going to largely ignore. (If you are interested, start by searching for “Alan Kay Dynabook”.)
Smalltalk went through a few different iterations in the 1970s, but the version that we know today is a direct descendent of Smalltalk-80, which was the first version released to the wider world.
For most of the 80s and 90s, Smalltalk was something that doesn’t really exist today – a programming language and environment that companies paid money to use. Lots of money. The major player was ParcPlace, which was a spinoff of Xerox that provided Smalltalk tools. Their commercial product was originally called ObjectWorks, later changed to VisualWorks, and eventually sold off and presumably slowly losing customers after the late 90s.
Smalltalk was pretty big in the industry for a while. Most of the aviation industry ran on it in the 90s, the big payroll project that was the basis for Extreme Programming was a Smalltalk project, there was reasonably high demand for Smalltalk programmers through at least the mid 1990s. I taught an undergrad OO class in Smalltalk in 1997 and 1998 to students that wanted to be learning C++, and I remember telling them that Smalltalk programmers were paid more.
I first encountered Smalltalk as a grad student in about 1993, where Georgia Tech used ObjectWorks to teach Smalltalk and Object-Oriented programming (there’s a whole other sidebar about how Object-Oriented languages came to prominence in the 90s, and the arguments over that but again, another day). ObjectWorks was pricey, and there was also a lower-cost vendor called Digitalk, and eventually I also used a product called Smalltalk Agents, which has apparently totally vanished from the entire internet.
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