Python, Ruby, and JS/ES are all on the same side of the Smalltalk family tree, aren't they?
On another side of the Smalltalk family tree, languages like Java embraced a kind of static typing and found strong success with it, leading to the promotion of strongly-typed structures over lambdas. This side, ironically, did the most work on JITs, which are meant to compensate for dynamic language features, and languages like Dart are still marrying JIT techniques to strong static type systems today.
And on another side of the Smalltalk family tree, languages like E are fully oriented around objects with rights, so that instead of structures which can be examined, values must have messages sent to them instead. Homoiconicity, lambdas, pattern-matching lists, and other staples of Scheme are nonetheless common in E and Monte.
I think that the Smalltalk family, overall, could be viewed as a response to the barren syntactic landscape of Lisp, but I think that they could also be viewed like any other language: Taking what they like from ancestors, and not taking what they don't like.
On another side of the Smalltalk family tree, languages like Java embraced a kind of static typing and found strong success with it, leading to the promotion of strongly-typed structures over lambdas. This side, ironically, did the most work on JITs, which are meant to compensate for dynamic language features, and languages like Dart are still marrying JIT techniques to strong static type systems today.
And on another side of the Smalltalk family tree, languages like E are fully oriented around objects with rights, so that instead of structures which can be examined, values must have messages sent to them instead. Homoiconicity, lambdas, pattern-matching lists, and other staples of Scheme are nonetheless common in E and Monte.
I think that the Smalltalk family, overall, could be viewed as a response to the barren syntactic landscape of Lisp, but I think that they could also be viewed like any other language: Taking what they like from ancestors, and not taking what they don't like.