From what I understand, Smalltalk was the first language that defined the IDE used to program in it as part of the language definition. Pretty scary stuff, considering Smalltalk first saw light of the day in the early 70's. Modern IDEs didn't come about until the mid 80's, long after (in computer terms) Smalltalk-80 was formed. It's funny to hear people complain about the widgets in Smalltalk being so primitive. They are primitive: they were first! 1971. What were you doing in 1971? And Smalltalk is still far ahead of most modern programming languages.
Sometimes (ok, every day) I wonder what the hell the purpose of software is. It doesn't seem to add value to the world. But Smalltalk... geez. It actually changed things for everyday people. -- Sunir Shah
See original on c2.com 