tech beacon: Nothing could be further from the truth. by Richard Eng
'Smalltalk is still very relevant. It's an excellent instructional language for teaching programming to people who have no technical background. It's a superlative prototyping language for startups. It's an industrial-strength enterprise language used by businesses both big and small all around the globe. There are good reasons to consider using modern Smalltalk today, since much has changed in recent years to improve its prospects.
'You don't have to use Smalltalk in production today, but try coding something in Smalltalk and see how it feels. It should feel familiar, because Smalltalk's implementation of the object-oriented (OO) paradigm is so excellent that it has influenced an entire generation of OO languages, such as Objective-C, Python, Ruby, CLOS, PHP 5, Perl 6, Erlang, Groovy, Scala, Dart, Swift, and so on.
'By learning Smalltalk, you'll understand how all of those useful features in today's OO languages came to be. Learning Smalltalk could also give you a big edge in programming skills among your peers, and it could be a great tool for teaching programming to beginners.'