SmallTalk

The official language of Extreme Programming. Because it makes refactoring as painless as possible.

For people who like visual IDEs, the gold standard is always a Smalltalk environment.

Created by Alan Kay and others. See this Dr Dobbs Journal article http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=7119/ddj0205a/0205a.htm

Alan Kay's Early History is interesting. It includes a section on Douglas Engelbart.

old SmallTalk books free online as EBook collection

Alan Kay said SmallTalk was Object Oriented, but it should have been Message Oriented (Messaging)

Dan Ingalls on the Design Principles (from 1981). The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the Creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming language) that serves as an interface between the models in the human mind and those in computing hardware, and a language of interaction (user interface) that matches the human communication system to that of the computer.

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