BA Chapter 14

This chapter gives a rather nostalgic overview of the basic architectural ideas behind the design of Smalltalk. The question of inheritance and its good/bad uses is addressed initially, and its support comes from the description of Smalltalk itself. Earlier, I came across a post describing how Smalltalk might make its comeback. The author in that post says that Smalltalk was ahead of its time, and now that OO concepts are firmly implanted in the heads of every beginning programmer, Smalltalk might be an option to consider. Many of the benefits espoused by languages such as Python, Ruby etc have been around earlier in Smalltalk and I think many people (who are unfamiliar) overloook this aspect. People who like concepts such as metaprogramming, dynamic typing etc will find that Smalltalk is similar to their needs. The regrowth in popularity of Smalltalk might be just a temporary fad as much of the earlier "problems" have been solved by languages such as Java with the growth and advancement of hardware and by software which could deliver "executables". With the recent growth in web applications, I think Smalltalk frameworks such as Seaside should become popular as well.