Absolutely. It's great hearing tales of people who used and loved Smalltalk.
I'm pushing back against anyone repeating the received wisdom "zomg genius! it was too good to live in this fallen world" without having ever used it.
I don't pretend to be a sample size greater than one, but I think it's worth noting that, in this batch of comments, if you only count the people who used Smalltalk, and not the people who saw an old Alan Kay interview on Youtube, you're likely to be somewhere south of n=20.
Not only did I saw plenty of interviews of Alan Kay, I learned OOP with Turbo Pascal 5.5, improved my OOP skills with Turbo Vision 6.0 in TP 6 and Borland C++.
Later moved into Turbo Pascal for Windows and Turbo C++ for Windows, using Object Windows Library, followed by early versions of C++ Builder and Delphi, using Visual Component Library.
Used Smalltalk/V during university, was introduced to the alternative OOP programming models of SELF, SWI Prolog, Native Oberon (including Oberon-2 / Component Pascal) and plenty of other stuff, including being a Java early adopter and pushing C++ with IDE tooling on places still stuck in C.
So yeah, Smalltalk was a genius environment and everyone has a different learning process.
For example I try to stay away from UNIX cli as much as I can, yet I learned UNIX via Xenix in 1993 and used almost every major UNIX variant since then.
> if you only count the people who used Smalltalk, and not the people who saw an old Alan Kay interview on Youtube, you're likely to be somewhere south of n=20.
To support your view:
A competitor "stole" a large maintenance project from us.
I suggested to someone at my company that they would have trouble recruiting as I assumed we were the biggest smalltalk community in Norway.
Their answer was that we were probably the only real smalltalk community.
They might be wrong, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that yet.
And that competitor kept calling all of my colleagues that had - at any point - worked anywere near smalltalk :-)
Even we do the vast majority of our development in other languages.
I sent you a mail to the address in your profile :-)
For anyone else, I'm not in a position to hire anyone but if you know Norwegian, Danish or Swedish reasonably well and want an interesting job with nice people (well, if you like people from the Nordic countries) then feel free to ask me.
We mostly work on larger systems, some of the systems was born a decade before the youngest persons who maintain them, others are brand new today but will hopefully be equally valuable and live a long life as well :-)
I use Smalltalk nearly every day, it's my prototyping / experimentation substrate. I've also done several interactive presentations and taught classes using Squeak as the medium.
I'm convinced that Smalltalk was so far ahead of its time, that it will take several decades [if it happens at all] before "programmers" get equivalent functionality from mainstream development platforms. Which is fine by me, since I am an EE by day and view programming as an artistic process thus do it for fun, not money. Which is another reason why Smalltalk failed in the market. It was made by geniuses and was aimed at art & research, not a bunch of cogs stuck in cubicles.
I'm pushing back against anyone repeating the received wisdom "zomg genius! it was too good to live in this fallen world" without having ever used it.
I don't pretend to be a sample size greater than one, but I think it's worth noting that, in this batch of comments, if you only count the people who used Smalltalk, and not the people who saw an old Alan Kay interview on Youtube, you're likely to be somewhere south of n=20.