Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk
Last time, we talked about Perl as an influence on Ruby, this time, we’ll talk about the other major influence on Ruby: Smalltalk. Smalltalk had a different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk’s syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system. Also unlike Perl, I spent a good couple of years working in Smalltalk, and it is one of my favorite languages that I’ll never likely use in anger again. (A Personal) History of Smalltalk Smalltalk originated in the same Xerox PARC team that invented the windowed interface, ethernet, and the laser printer, and who knows what else, they may have invented ice cream and rainbows. There’s a whole…
