I did Smalltalk for ~20 years as my primary. I’m a polyglot now, maintaining/implementing in C, Python, Swift, Kotlin, and Elixir.

The thing (for me) about Smalltalk was the thought to code ratio. It was awesome. It had a pretty good balance of less is more. Where working in Swift and Kotlin feel like trying to navigate the many nuances of American football or cricket, Smalltalk was like playing soccer/football-sans-america. The syntax is simple. And the computation model is straitforward and simple.

Elixir is kind of like that, computationally, a few simple concepts and everything builds on that. The saddest part about Elixir is that it ran with the whole do/end syntax. Drives me nuts. But I love that computationally, though different than Smalltalk, it’s like Smalltalk in that it’s a simple consistent model.