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Well, there are surprisingly few CS graduates who actually understand Object Oriented Programming as Alan Kay designed it for Smalltalk, which in turn lowers the probabilty that any of them will build a qualitatively better language.

I mean there are a lot of other skills a programmer needs to have than to understand what OOP is, but sometimes I think it would be better if more young students would learn Smalltalk to understand what OOP is about and why the simple existence of classes doesn't make a language an OO language...




OOP was taught to me using Smalltalk (VisualWorks actually). It was a PL class, so it didn’t go deep, including also Lisp, Prolog, and SML.

I wonder, though, how my OOP thinking would differ if my first exposure was through BETA or Eiffel.


It could be different, but might not be. Exposure to different languages can later broaden your horizon. I started with programming with a programmable calculator, then BASIC, Assembler, Pascal, Modula 2, ... which then typically leads with Wirth moving into OO with Clascal, Oberon, Object Pascal, ...




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