Everyone talks about Smalltalk in reverent tones, but not too many people actually use it. Why not? Why aren’t there lots of people using Smalltalk nowadays? And what can we learn from this, to ensure that Ruby continues to be popular? In this talk, Bob Martin describes (starting with the beginning of the universe) the reasons why Smalltalk never caught on massively, and what the Ruby community can do to ensure that it doesn’t happen there, too.