TECHNOLOGY
Smalltalk
The programming language Alan Kay and his team built at Xerox PARC in the 1970s — the first fully object-oriented language and the executable core of the Dynabook vision.
Smalltalk was developed at Xerox PARC between 1972 and 1980 as the implementation language for the Dynabook. Unlike earlier languages that treated data and procedures as separate entities, Smalltalk organized all computation around objects — self-contained units that held both state and behavior and communicated only by sending messages. Every integer, every window, every interface element was an object. The language was designed not just to produce working programs but to be a medium of expression: a child reading Smalltalk code should be able to understand what the code meant and modify it to mean something else. Smalltalk directly shaped Objective-C, Java, Ruby, Python, and nearly every modern programming environment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Smalltalk's central architectural insight — that software should be organized as communities of communicating objects rather than as sequences of procedural instructions — came from Kay's background in biology and his reading of the work on cellular systems. Kay saw biological cells as the model for robust, modular software: