Smalltalk and the Metaobject Protocol <i>are</i> things to revile and shun.<p>They <i>aren&#x27;t</i> elegant programming models and they <i>aren&#x27;t</i> even internally consistent programming models.<p>If you read Smalltalk papers, they aren&#x27;t really compsci papers at all. They&#x27;re musings about some ideas they tried and how well they thought they worked afterwards.<p>The language world is moving to a more coherent, formal, mathematical understanding of type systems, programming languages, and automatable proof systems.