Some internal feeling makes me believe,that Smalltalk would be an ideal language for Haiku-OS/OpenBeOS (which looks more and more alive,again).
BeOS was always about C++,opposing UNIX’es,MacOS’es and Windows’es choice of C (well,formally,windows had C++ api,but,still,it was very C-ish in it’s essence). Years passed,MacOS switched to Objective-C,Windows switched to C#. Both of these languages are higher-level OOP languages which have some kind of memory-management. C++,while it has some advantages,still is not as easy and dynamic as these languages are.
Unfortunately,both Objective-C and C# are developed by Apple and Microsoft (correspondingly) behind the closed-doors.
So,what is the alternative? I see two of them:
D is good,as it makes a step from C++ to real life,but is still low-levelish,by design. memory management will solve some headaches,but programming in it won’t be as fun as it can be. I like to see D as a language for writing libraries.
Smalltalk,on the other hand,is a high-level dynamic language which is just what is needed. Once you “taste”the fruit of dynamic languages you wouldn’t want to code high-level tasks in static-languages anymore (static is extremely good in low-level,though). To give you a brief idea on what all this is about,there is a nice article by a game developer who switched from C++ to Smalltalk:Learning to Talk:Introduction to Talking.
Further reading:
- Comparison of Objective-C and Smalltalk
- Smalltalk implementations
- Ambrai Smalltalk (Smalltalk for MacOS-X)
- F-Script (Smalltalk-based scripting environment for Cocoa)
- Comparison of programming languages @ wikipedia
