I used to dislike OOP and favor functional programming languages, until I started working with Smalltalk. I guess the fact that blocks are closures and also first-class objects make up the difference somehow. I learned that programming paradigm is not the main factor I appreciate in a language, but also the elegant/coherent design, simplicity, liveness of the programming environment etc.
Also since most of the time developers spend debugging programmings, today I think languages should be designed with improved debugging features in mind. Statically programming languages are doing great progress here (always heard great things about error messages from Rust). Smalltalk and Common Lisp OTH, besides having nice error messages, also have exceptions with resumable semantics. The hability to always get a debugger during an exception without unwinding the stack is such a huge help (specially for dynamic languages), allowing one to fix a running program and continue working.
I maintain/develop a complex Smalltalk GUI desktop application and rarely restart it during development (which always take a while, since stuff like connecting and loading data from the database takes some time). Also I can always fire up the debugger to inspect objects I want to change (like dialogs etc), edit code and run it in any frame of the stack (like a REPL everywhere) etc. Maintaining this codebase in a dynamic programming language with exceptions that use the traditional termination model would be a nightmare, every crash would require a restart, and you don't have a compiler to help you. It's no surprise that people just turned to statically typing for this kind of system.
I started a new job in Smalltalk one year ago without any previous experience with the language (background in Scheme, a bit of Common Lisp / Clojure, C, C++, Java, Python, Haskell and a couple of other languages). I had three pair programming sessions in the beginning and that was it, it took me one month to get a grasp of the codebase I have to maintain/develop further. The application is huge, but the tooling and discoverability of the programming environment (including best debugging experience I've ever seen) made it super easy to dive into the system and learn everything practically by myself. This and the fact that everything follows the same basic design principles (objects all the way down) make it a perfect match for solving complex problems.
Honestly my experience at work was mostly with Visualworks. But I've been using Pharo in two side projects and I'm loving it. It became one of my top 3 programming languages I've ever used (together with Scheme and CL). It's impressive how much this rather small community achieved, thanks for the awesome work and this new release!
Also since most of the time developers spend debugging programmings, today I think languages should be designed with improved debugging features in mind. Statically programming languages are doing great progress here (always heard great things about error messages from Rust). Smalltalk and Common Lisp OTH, besides having nice error messages, also have exceptions with resumable semantics. The hability to always get a debugger during an exception without unwinding the stack is such a huge help (specially for dynamic languages), allowing one to fix a running program and continue working.
I maintain/develop a complex Smalltalk GUI desktop application and rarely restart it during development (which always take a while, since stuff like connecting and loading data from the database takes some time). Also I can always fire up the debugger to inspect objects I want to change (like dialogs etc), edit code and run it in any frame of the stack (like a REPL everywhere) etc. Maintaining this codebase in a dynamic programming language with exceptions that use the traditional termination model would be a nightmare, every crash would require a restart, and you don't have a compiler to help you. It's no surprise that people just turned to statically typing for this kind of system.