Smalltalk
programming language
Smalltalk is a purely object-oriented programming language that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learning Research Group (LRG) scientists, including Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, and Scott Wallace.
In Smalltalk, executing programs are built of opaque, atomic objects, which are instances of template code stored in classes. These objects intercommunicate by passing of messages, via an intermediary virtual machine environment (VM). A relatively small number of objects, called primitives, are not amenable to live redefinition, sometimes being defined independently of the Smalltalk programming environment.
Having undergone significant industry development toward other uses, including business and database functions, Smalltalk is still in use today. When first publicly released, Smalltalk-80 presented numerous foundational ideas for the nascent field of object-oriented programming.
Since inception, the language provided interactive programming via an integrated development environment. This requires reflection and late binding in the language execution of code. Later development has led to at least one instance of Smalltalk execution environment which lacks such an integrated graphical user interface or front-end.
The public source identifies “Smalltalk” as programming language. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Smalltalk, programming and language.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q235086. The Library of Congress control number is sh87003115. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Smalltalk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.