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Asked: 2026-06-13T10:01:05+00:00

I’m currently learning Smalltalk in the Squeak environment and I’m reading Squeak – A

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I’m currently learning Smalltalk in the Squeak environment and I’m reading “Squeak – A Quick Trip To ObjectLand”. I enter the object-oriented paradigm with some prior knowledge from Python and Java and this sentence from the book on page 36 has made me think:

Smalltalk is a class-based implementation of an object-oriented language.

Short sentence but very interesting. In OO all terms like class, object, instance seem to be well-defined and seem to point to the one and only true meaning and you’re likely to come across generic sentences like “objects are instances of a class”.
But you hear seldom about implementation strategies. What does implementation of the object-oriented concept mean in this case? Are there implementations of OO languages other than classes?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Javascript is a prototype based implementation of an OO language.

    Instead of subclassing a class and creating an instance of that new class, you inherit behaviour by cloning a prototype.

    As a historical note I should add that while Javascript is probably the most widely used prototype-using language, the first was David Ungar’s and Randall Smith’s Self language.

    There are several implementations of prototypes floating around for Squeak. I haven’t used them, so I can’t comment on the libraries.

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