Smalltalk in Information Week

Now here's something cool. very nice article on Smalltalk, web services, and ease of development:

There's more talk about Smalltalk these days, as the object-oriented programming language gains something of a developer following for Web applications. The notion of Web services, where one discrete piece of software talks to another without knowing very much about the other system, was a concept that originated in Smalltalk, say implementers of these new apps.

Now there's a nice piece of news - something that will hopefully catch some eyes. There's more:

Some experts point out that Java, C++, and Microsoft's C# are evolving in a direction set over 30 years ago by Smalltalk, yet rarely do proponents of these languages acknowledge their debt. Such oversight only reinforces the undying loyalty that some developers feel toward the language. "I will quit coding in Smalltalk when they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers," says Karen Hope, chief architect of an online Smalltalk insurance-quote application at the St. Paul Companies Inc.

And then this, from Allen Davis:

Smalltalk is "by far the best programming language available for Web and enterprise development," says Allen Davis, the new executive director of the Smalltalk Industry Council and CEO of Smalltalk vendor Knowledge Systems Corp. When it was first conceived by Alan Kay and his team at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Smalltalk was regarded as a resource hog. But as systems grew in processing power, Smalltalk began to come into its own. As part of its effort to revitalize the language, the council is organizing its first Smalltalk Solutions Conference, July 14 to 16, in Toronto.

Some other developments are in Smalltalk's favor. IBM includes Smalltalk in its VisualAge integrated development environment. And Cincom Systems Inc., which acquired a Smalltalk toolset from ParcPlace, has lowered prices for getting started from $3,500 to a free download for developer try-out and $500 a year for one developer's deployment of Smalltalk applications to one or two users.

So get the to the download site and have a look!