Using Smalltalk-80, programmers can produce prototypes much faster than with C or Pascal. What techniques do Smalltalk-80 programmers use to produce these prototypes? What is special about Smalltalk-80 that enables them to uses these techniques? Can these techniques be used with conventional languages such as C?
In an attempt to answer these questions we interviewed experienced Smalltalk programmers and asked how they approach programming in Smalltalk. Such introspective interviews that are conducted after completion of a project are known to be somewhat unreliable, but not enough is known to use any other methodology. What follows is a summary of the interviews, followed by an explanation of the results. Finally we discuss some of the weaknesses of Smalltalk and some possible solutions.
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SANDBERG, D. W., 1988. Smalltalk and exploratory programming. ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 1 October 1988. Vol. 23, no. 10, p. 85–92. doi 
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Don Birkley, Dale Henrichs, Verna Knapp, Ward Cunningham, Mike Miller, Eirik Fuller, and Norm Delisle willingly shared their Smalltalk experience with the author. Ritchey Ruff and Tom Dietterich shared their InterLisp-D experience. Without the generous support of Tektronix, this work would not have been started.