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I left the Smalltalk world years ago (for Java ... hmm was it a win?) but the thing I miss the most is ... reading great code. Within the Smalltalk image/IDE, everyday you read code that other folks - many with brains much much bigger than mine - have written, and its great. A lot of the code I read now (Java,Objective-C) is ... err ... brain hurt :-(

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> everyday you read code that other folks - many with brains much much bigger than mine - have written, and its great.

I don't think that it's a language thing. It's probably popularity thing most of all.

In popular languages the quality of the average line of code is pretty low. Plus, you know, real-world constraints of real developers working under real-world constraints....

The funny thing that back in the NeXTSTEP days there were so few Objective-C books that I noticed myself and other programmers were buying Smalltalk books also (not that there were a lot of Smalltalk books).

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