How can we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Smalltalk?

The 50th anniversary of Smalltalk is coming up in 2022. What can we do to celebrate this momentous occasion?

Smalltalk is still one of the greatest programming languages ever invented. It keeps company with other great languages like LISP and Scheme and Forth.

Smalltalk has had a profound influence on the software industry and computer science and programming language design. Objective-C, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python, Dart, Groovy, Scala, and others owe their OOP implementations to Smalltalk.

Smalltalk helped invent the modern GUI and WYSIWYG interface. Apple and Microsoft thank you.

Smalltalk invented the modern IDE by integrating a text editor, class browser, object inspector, and debugger. Visual Studio and IntelliJ IDEA thank you.

Smalltalk advanced live coding by adding a GUI front end, thus making it very easy and convenient to use. Live coding makes you supremely productive.

Smalltalk practically invented TDD (test-driven development), as well as XP (extreme programming).

Smalltalk invented the MVC pattern (Model-View-Controller).

Smalltalk helped pioneer the language virtual machine. Java and C# thank you.

Smalltalk helped pioneer JIT compilation.

Smalltalk gave us the world’s first refactoring browser. This tool helps make Smalltalk a very maintainable language.

Smalltalk remains the finest OOP language in the world. It is just about as versatile as any other language you can think of, including Python and Java.

Smalltalk can be used for back-end web with Seaside and Teapot, front-end web with Amber and PharoJS, mobile with Cordova/PhoneGap, data science with PolyMath, Roassal, and Moose, machine learning with TensorFlow, IoT with PharoThings, robotics with PhaROS, virtual reality, games, enterprise business computing, and so on. It has even been used to create an operating system (SqueakNOS)!

Smalltalk belongs in any programming language hall of fame. Let’s celebrate its anniversary with gusto.

Add your suggestions in the comments. The winning suggestion will receive a Smalltalk T-shirt:

This shirt is part of a giveaway at The James Robertson Memorial Programming Competition held in Canada in 2020.

The winner will be notified by a private note in their posted comment, so make sure you follow this blog.