Can Learning Smalltalk Make You A Better Programmer?

Slashdot reader horrido shares an article that "has done more for Smalltalk advocacy than any other article in memory." It was the second-most popular article of the year on the Hewlett Packard Enterprise site TechBeacon (recently passing 20,000 views), with Richard Eng, the founder of the nonprofit Smalltalk Renaissance, arguing that the 44-year-old language is much more than a tool for teachers -- and not just because Amber Smalltalk transpiles to JavaScript for front-end web programming. It's a superlative prototyping language for startups. It's an industrial-strength enterprise language used by businesses both big and small all around the globe... Smalltalk's implementation of the object-oriented paradigm is so excellent that it has influenced an entire generation of OO languages, such as Objective-C, Python, Ruby, CLOS, PHP 5, Perl 6, Erlang, Groovy, Scala, Dart, Swift, and so on. By learning Smalltalk, you'll understand how all of those useful features in today's OO languages came to be.
The article also argues that Smalltalk pioneered just-in-time compilation and virtual machines, the model-view-controller design paradigm, and to a large extent, even test-driven development. But most importantly, Smalltalk's reliance on domain-specific languages makes it "the 'purest' OO, and one of the earliest... It is often said that programming in Smalltalk or Python is rather like Zen; your mind just flows effortlessly with the task. This is the beauty and value of language simplicity, and Smalltalk has this in spades... Smalltalk, by virtue of its object purity and consistency, will give you a profoundly better understanding of object-oriented programming and how to use it to its best effect."

Comments

Mind blowing

[Santana]

I was surprised, maybe shocked, by how much Smalltalk has contributed to the world[1], how far we have deviated from it[2], and how slowly we are converging to it again[3].

[1] object oriented programming, virtual machine, just-in-time compilation, test-driven development, Model-View-Controller design pattern, object databases
[2] inventing problems by trying to coerce static typed programming languages to behave like dynamic ones (Java, Go, et cetera, I'm looking at you)
[3] by slowly incorporating Smalltalk features into current popular programming languages. Ruby for instance is heavily based on Smalltalk.

Yes it can, but that doesn't mean it will

[mark-t]

Learning *ANY* programming language can make someone a better programmer... offer them a new way of looking at how to solve certain types of problems and innovate new and elegant solutions that hadn't occurred to them previously as they learn the idioms of a new programming language.

But like any other programming language, learning it will *NOT* necessarily make you a better programmer, and there's certainly not anything unique to Smalltalk that might make becoming a better programmer after learning it especially likely.

Yes, but who has the time?

[tgibson]

Though I came to Smalltalk after C++, there is no doubt it informs why all things OO are the way they are. However, who has the time to attain this insight? I programmed in C for three years before learning C++ in the early '90s and there is no doubt that my knowledge of C makes many design decisions behind C++ clear (e.g., how many "young" C++ programmers actually know why the designers of C++ foisted the Rule of three onto the language). But I was too busy keeping up with endlessly changing technologies to learn, say, BCPL, to better understand the design decisions behind C.

Run forward, nascent programmers! Your knowledge of (choose your modern language) today will inform the design behind the language you learn ten years from now.