I recently read a couple of articles reviewing why Smalltalk "died". This got me thinking. Why can't Smalltalk be revived? For the most part, Smalltalk's weaknesses have been addressed today. While the Smalltalk community is still somewhat fragmented, there are really only three prominent Smalltalk flavors for enterprise use: open-source , commercial , and commercial . Commercial Smalltalks are important because many enterprise users insist on having solid, reliable, commercial support. Pharo VAST VisualWorks Pharo is becoming increasingly important in the enterprise space, especially with support from the . Pharo Consortium I've run Pharo on a Raspberry Pi and it runs quite well! Pharo plays well with GitHub, thanks to the Iceberg facility. Pharo is web-ready with and frameworks, as well as for front-end development. Seaside Teapot PharoJS So, why should you use Smalltalk? Smalltalk has the following winning qualities: Simplicity and elegance — Smalltalk presents a very low for developers. cognitive load Object-oriented purity — Smalltalk is the ideal way to do object-oriented software development. It supports enormous . scalability Imaged-based development — It combines an application with an IDE and portable OS platform, complete with everything the application needs in order to execute. (Imagine a VirtualBox or VMware Linux image containing Eclipse and your Java application. It's like that.) Smalltalk is a better Docker than Docker! All of the above lead to incredible , typically 2–3X, in some instances up to 5X! What is it worth to you to cut your development time in half (or better)? programmer productivity increase Note 1 — A Smalltalk is comparable to a VirtualBox or VMware Linux virtual machine running a Java application along with the Eclipse IDE used to create the application. The Linux VM is portable and can be easily deployed anywhere. Smalltalk refined this concept decades earlier! image Note 2 — Smalltalk's productivity is illustrated in on function point metrics for a variety of programming languages: Capers Jones' study Table 16: Side-by-Side Comparison of function points and lines of code metrics Language — Total Work Hours C — 26,273 COBOL — 22,394 Fortran — 22,394 JavaScript — 15,929 Lisp — 14,636 C++ — 12,697 Java — 12,697 Python — 12,697 C# — 12,309 Ruby — 11,312 Delphi — 8,289 Objective-C — 7,848 Smalltalk — 6,879 Even much-hyped languages like Go, Dart, Elixir, Haskell, and Julia don't fare as well as Smalltalk.

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