Smalltalk, Anyone?
The Smalltalk programming language is a wonderful tool for “pure” object-oriented programming. It goes back to the 1970s; the first official release was in 1980. Smalltalk came with a full-fledged graphical user interface, and an integrated development environment. Its debugger allowed for changing code of the running system on the spot, without having to restart everything, even in the middle of running a test suite. (If that makes you shrug, remember this was in 1980.)
There are multiple implementations of the language and environment still. The one I’d recommend - and that helped me earn my doctorate and subsequent postdoc position - is Squeak. It was written by a team around the original inventors of Smalltalk.
In case you’re interested in getting a different idea of what object-oriented programming in a live environment can be, check out Squeak, and the free book Squeak by Example. The latest release PDF is here.
Tags: hacking