SF So Smalltalk is to Shakespeare as Excel is to car crashes in the TV culture?
AK No, if you look at it really historically, Smalltalk counts as a minor Greek play that was miles ahead of what most other cultures were doing, but nowhere near what Shakespeare was able to do.
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
SF The analogy is even better because there are the hidden chambers that nobody can understand.
AK I would compare the Smalltalk stuff that we did in the ’70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldn’t put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago.
There's more there, and it's worth reading. The thing I take away from this - Smalltalk is hardly perfect, but it encapsulates a lot of ideas that should be driving the industry. At present, the things driving the industry are more like a sledgehammer than they are like precision tools.
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