Except that Smalltalk is so aggressively duck-typed that inheritance is not particularly first class except as an easy way to build derived classes using base classes as a template. When it comes to actually working with objects, the protocol they follow (roughly: the informally specified API they implement) is paramount, and compositional techniques have been a part of Smalltalk best practice since forever ago (something it took C++ and Java devs decades to understand). This allows you to abuse the snotdoodles out of the doesNotUnderstand: operator to delegate received messages to another object or other objects; and also the become: operator to substitute one object for another, even if they lie worlds apart on the class-hierarchy tree, usually without the caller knowing the switch has taken place. As long as they respond to the expected messages in the right way, it all adds up the same both ways.