The Irony of F-Script
I remember reading about Smalltalk in the 80s and was always interested in it. In the early 1990s, when I worked for Power Measurement, we actually bought and tried the Digitalk Smalltalk to see if we could use it for our product development. It turns out it was not a suitable platform for a couple reasons, but language was elegant and simple (I recall the grammar fit on a single page in the manual) and the environment was easy to use and learn. I was frustrated for years after that after working with C++, wasting huge amounts of time compiling and linking and debugging and typing in braces and brackets and other syntactic noise - knowing that Smalltalk was out there and way more pleasant and productive to work in.
I remember being disappointed when Java came out and promptly killed the bit traction Smalltalk had at the time.
I left programming as a career a long time ago. The irony is that now, when I really don’t have time or desire to program at all, I am finding myself learning a Smalltalk dialect F-Script so I can do some scripting and reporting in my my contact management system (Daylite). F-Script actually adds some nice improvements over the other Smalltalks (and most other languages including the agile languages) when dealing with collections and arrays.