SMALLTALK: THE THIRD BOOK ON MY DESK

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of The Agile Software Engineering Deep Dive, Alessandro Guida looks back at Smalltalk, one of the most influential programming languages in the history of software development. The episode explores Smalltalk’s origins at Xerox PARC and the ideas that made it so distinctive, from objects communicating through messages to live programming environments where developers could inspect, modify, and continue working with running systems. It also looks at Smalltalk’s role in event-driven graphical applications and the emergence of Model-View-Controller, as well as its wider influence on object-oriented programming, modern IDEs, interactive debugging, unit testing, and rapid feedback loops. The discussion is also practical about Smalltalk’s limitations and why it never became a mainstream industrial language on the scale of Java, C#, Python, or JavaScript. The broader lesson is that programming languages are often valuable for more than the systems we build with them. They can change the way we think about software. Smalltalk did exactly that.Support the showThis Podcast is an audio version of the written Agile Software Engineering newsletter.  If you want to go deeper, don't forget to subscribe the newsletter too.