Just yesterday I was talking with a friend who works at Instantiations [1]. They were founded in 1988, and still ship a new release every year of Smalltalk. What I find fascinating is that customers are actively building on it and seem happy.

[1] https://www.instantiations.com/

Whenever this story (and all the related stories about PARC) re-surface, I am (writing now in late 2026) mostly sad about the incredible language that should have 'won' .. well .. everything!

The term 'footgun' unfortunately matches all too well: something so great, so powerful yet most of the time, even in the hands of well-intended folks, proceeds to shoot oneself in the foot. I was for more than a decade a professional Smalltalk developer (Telecommunications, Financial/Derivatives) but we were replaced by technically inferior systems, mostly Java, JavaScript and even VisualBasic. The HR person at the Financial company explained (after my exit interview!) that for the cost of a single Smalltalk developer, they could hire 4 or 5 lesser experienced programmers (less cognizant of how systems actually worked!). The HR folks preferred these hires: more selection, cheaper . etc. Sigh!

Am I a horrible person to enjoy so much (schadenfreude!) the upcoming AI/LLM footgun massacre?

A lot of people don't know that Smalltalk heavily influenced NeXTSTEP and Objective-C. You'll see a lot of it in Interface Builder->Project Builder->XCode with the GUI serialization (and of course Obj-C message passing and general dynamic nature).

This is a good history:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-deep-history-of-your-ap...