> In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews
I'd be interested to know as well. It might be worth writing him a physical letter asking about it. There is a mailing address for his department at ETH here (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/index.html) and I'm willing to bet they know how to forward him correspondence.
His home address and phone number are even in the phonebook, but I don't consider myself or the subject important enough to bother him with it. But maybe someone else here has insider information. That said, there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that he either didn't know Smalltalk in the nineties or didn't think it was worth mentioning. After all, Xerox themselves did not use Smalltalk in their products either, and even at PARC the other teams tended to work with BCPL or Mesa rather than Smalltalk. I read an interview with Larry Tesler where he describes that for a demonstration of a Smalltalk application they had to fast forward the movie so that the menus would pop up fast enough. Not surprisingly, Tesler then brought Object Pascal to life at Apple in collaboration with Wirth, instead of using Smalltalk as he had in his previous job (even though Apple had a license - that was used nota bene later for Squeak).
I'd be interested to know as well. It might be worth writing him a physical letter asking about it. There is a mailing address for his department at ETH here (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/index.html) and I'm willing to bet they know how to forward him correspondence.