Agreed, but the way the industry disrupts itself makes it difficult to consider the time and effort needed to build something better from the ground up. Public time goes faster, since it’s already surmised what could be done, as far as it’s concerned it may as well have already accomplished it. By the time it is in fact accomplished it, it’s too late for the public to be interested any longer, and unfortunately, developers see themselves and other developers as a ‘public’.

But in another sense, only when public interest has died away and gone on to the ‘newest’ thing, can something like Smallltalk become what it is. And only after that can we catch up to it. I learned Smalltalk first in 1988, the only language I had previously used to any degree was Forth (I wrote a sequencer in 8080 assembler and as soon as the sequencer was finished, promptly forgot all of it). At that point it seemed very natural to me, whereas the follow-on course in Objective-C felt weird. It felt older and more primitive than Forth.

You can imagine how it felt to write in C++ when I first worked in the industry … And then Java came along.

We’re nowhere near catching up to LISP, the few variants still around barely qualify as LISP.

The paradigm changes needed to go beyond Smalltalk and LISP haven’t occurred yet, we haven’t even fully recognized the paradigm changes they created, although we use them every day.