I still remember the Byte issue on Smalltalk from 1981 [0]. To high school me it was The Future for sure. It looked so cool. I had no way to try it on the family Apple II+ [1] though.

Trying out various Smalltalk-family systems in recent years showed the advantages of implementing the entire system in one language and running it in one image. There's a refreshing coherence and predictability to everything, and pervasive simplicity instead of fractal complexity.

You can browse the entire codebase in a single window - language/compiler, math operations (except for the base primitives I believe), data structures, graphics, window system, all nicely organized. Methods, even critical ones, are mostly small, straightforward, and cruft-free. Many are just a line or two.

Smalltalk gives the developer immense power. You work directly "in the code"; your changes are live instantly. You can trivially modify the system itself - just go there and start typing. All in the same browser window. You can easily look inside any running program, change its data and even its code, and just keep going. Even now it feels futuristic.

You get powerful graphics and a window system out of the box instead of the usual story where you select OpenGL/Vulkan/GUI/DOM libraries and configure tools like make/rpm/docker/pip/npm. That's probably the most "science fiction-y" aspect by far.

In short, this was the "Jetsons" future that seemed possible back when I was getting started. The future we actually got, of course, is far less elegant and unified, and far more messy and practical. That's probably for the best. But I still love Smalltalk.

[0] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05/page/155 (At the time I was sad because we didn't have the extra memory it needed. Now I'm more impressed that it was even possible.)