I was reading Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk recently. Quite an interesting article.
While I'm sure at least some of my audience has come across this before, I only stumbled across it recently. I've never had much chance to use Smalltalk in a serious way, though I've dabbled more than once and liked it. I also got quite interested in Dylan when Apple released their implementation and was disappointed to see them drop it.
Although I spend most of my time doing Java work, and thus have to deal with a more pragmatic OO environment, I find that in order to improve as a developer I need to look into other areas, such as Smalltalk, to see how they do things there. Even if it's not directly applicable, it's still interesting and often valuable.
In any case, it was a very interesting article. Reading Alan Kay's thoughts on how Smalltalk evolved, and seeing the sort of things they got that hardware to do, was realy quite impressive. A worthwhile read.
