I feel fortunate to have seen his talks and interviews early in my career.
The downside is that exposure to both of those led me to write some software in both Smalltalk and Common Lisp...which is a downside because having worked with those makes some currently popular tools seem like dirty hacks.
Although I use things and enjoy things like React, and Webpack, and npm and I'm very happy with the things I'm able to create with them, when I stop and think about it, the tooling and building/debugging workflow feels pretty disjointed to what was available in Smalltalk and CL environments 30 years ago.
I understand why those tools didn't win over the hearts and minds of developers at the time. They were expensive and not that easily accessible to the average developer. I just wish that as an industry, we'd at least have taken the time to understand what they did well and incorporate more of those lessons into our modern tools.
The downside is that exposure to both of those led me to write some software in both Smalltalk and Common Lisp...which is a downside because having worked with those makes some currently popular tools seem like dirty hacks.
Although I use things and enjoy things like React, and Webpack, and npm and I'm very happy with the things I'm able to create with them, when I stop and think about it, the tooling and building/debugging workflow feels pretty disjointed to what was available in Smalltalk and CL environments 30 years ago.
I understand why those tools didn't win over the hearts and minds of developers at the time. They were expensive and not that easily accessible to the average developer. I just wish that as an industry, we'd at least have taken the time to understand what they did well and incorporate more of those lessons into our modern tools.