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Discussion on: 5 Powerful Programming Languages to Stretch Your Brain

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aschwin profile image
Aschwin Wesselius

Somebody already mentioned Smalltalk. If one really wants to understand the Object Oriented paradigm, this is a great start.

Why learning Smalltalk can never be a waste of time
Smalltalk is not just a programming language
Why Aren’t People Using Smalltalk?

From there, you can browse around other articles on Smalltalk by the same author.

Next, Erlang is (like Smalltalk) one of the few languages that are pure Object Oriented. "Huh? It looks functional to me", I hear the noise your brain makes. Well, it looks functional, but functional and OO do not bite each other. They can be in the very same concept.

Interesting thread on Hacker News
Object Oriented Programming: The Wrong Path?

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jacobherrington profile image
Jacob Herrington (he/him)

Sure! I'd advise anyone specifically interested in learning OOP to learn some Smalltalk.

Personally, I didn't include it in the list because it's not a language I'm focused on learning right now and generally I treat blogging more like a notebook than anything.

Great feedback though, and thanks for sharing those articles I've read one or two of them but I'm looking at the others now πŸ‘

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

Smalltalk had all the stuff people consider "cool" today.. including Blocks (aka. lambdas) that really looked much slicker than the Lispy counterparts. Smalltalk was heavily influenced by Lisp. Very elegant language. I particularly liked the IBM variant.

But Smalltalk was poorly marketed and sold, and very expensive. There weren't free versions for college kids. And some of the versions were stuck in UIs from the early 80s rather than moving on to be more like Windows or other modern UIs. By the time people were ready for it, Java came and stole the show and dug the final nail in the Smalltalk coffin.

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aschwin profile image
Aschwin Wesselius

The final nail in Smalltalk?

Smalltalk is still alive! Even better, there projects being build with Pharo, Seaside and Teapot (I didn't made up these names).

Pharo is very easy to install, browse around and use to follow some introduction tutorials. It works great. It shows already how different the whole approach to programming it takes. But it can take some time to wrap the head around certain things to really grasp the philosophy of Smalltalk.