Alan Kay once said: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." There is no reason to invent when we can reuse, and there is nothing better to reuse than Kay's own invention, Smalltalk. Running within a highly usable programming environment, Smalltalk supports features such as "pure" objects, inheritance, polymorphism, garbage collection, bytecodes and a virtual machine, and write once run anywhere code. As Anthony Hoare once said about Algol 60, I believe Smalltalk too "has been a significant advance over most of its successors". In this talk, I will present the basic features of Smalltalk and recommend we look to the past for the future [pedagogic language].
Colloquia Series page.