Smalltalk and Pharo: Unknown rockstars

One of my all-time favorite programming books, about Smalltalk, is Smalltalk-80. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201113716/

That may be interest to those who want to investigate more.

Now freely available online, among tons of other Smalltalk books:

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/

[Edit: removed direct link to PDF]

Another is Beck's "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns." Just like Smalltalk-80, it's a book relevant for anyone writing software, almost regardless of language and discipline.

I feel like Objective-C is so close in spirit to Smalltalk, and with each syntax revision gets closer and closer, yet the utter simplicity of replacing "[foo: bar];" with "foo bar." I suspect will never happen. Too shocking for strict C programmers. I'd be totally happy to restrict traditional C-derived syntax to @ugly{ } blocks if it made more bold syntax changes possible.

"It never had a big company behind it or a good marketing strategy."

Wasn't IBM a backer of Smalltalk before it moved onto Java? I believe Eclipse started its life as IBM's Smalltalk IDE...