FORTRAN was my very first programming language. I learned it in high school. After I graduated from university, I started my IT career with FORTRAN. In fact, during the 1980s, I was a bona fide FORTRAN guru; I knew this language inside out and upside down. I truly have a soft spot for FORTRAN.

And, yes, I wouldn't recommend Fortran today. It has limited scope for anyone's IT career. But Smalltalk is different...

I'm surprised and shocked that you ignored everything I wrote in my two responses to you. It shows a certain level of parochialism. Life is not all about making money. It's not all about career.

There are enormous benefits to learning and using Smalltalk. For one thing, it's loads of fun. Smalltalk is just a terrific language to use for hobbyists and professionals alike.

For another, there is no better way to understand object-oriented programming (OOP) than to study Smalltalk. Most programmers don't understand how OOP is supposed to be applied. They learn OOP the wrong way from languages such as C++, Java, Python, etc. When OOP doesn't work out well for them, they blame OOP instead of blaming their education.

For another, Smalltalk is an opportunity for the IT industry to significantly improve the software development process. This requires brave souls to make the cognitive leap from the status quo of conventional tools and industry preference to a brave new world. Do you want to be a pioneer or a follower? Do you want to make breakthroughs or stay with mediocrity?

I've been a software engineer for over three decades since 1980. I've used FORTRAN, Tandem TAL, C/C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, Python, and Go. Smalltalk is on another plane entirely. You can't understand what you're missing until you've done Smalltalk development in earnest. The payoff is mind-blowing: low cognitive load; supreme productivity; architectural scalability.

The “people” I point towards Smalltalk include corporations and startups that care about “time to market” and saving costs on development and maintenance. So it’s not just “career-minded” people.

And that is why I point people to Smalltalk. It should no longer remain a secret.