Smalltalk
Smalltalk is a fully object-oriented programming language invented at Xerox PARC by a team led by Alan Kay. While Simula is generally recognized as the first object-oriented language, Smalltalk was instrumental in popularizing object orientation. Ruby borrows very extensively from Smalltalk in two major areas: the notion that everything is an object, and the concept of methods as messages that are passed to objects.
What does it mean to say that everything is an object? We’ve touched on this briefly in the Java discussion. In many languages, real “object” status is reserved for larger or more complicated things, while basic parts of the language are not considered objects. That’s why coders must invoke the abs method from within the Math ...
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