I've never tried Smalltalk so I can't really speak to that. But I have done some coding in ObjectiveC which is a direct descendant so I can tell you that I strongly prefer Lisp, and Common Lisp specifically because I prefer generic functions to message-passing. Message passing privileges the receiver object and thus introduces an asymmetry which is totally unnecessary. It does nothing but cause confusion. The whole point of having a high-level language is to reduce the cognitive load on the programmer, and message passing does the exact opposite. Message passing forces me to think, every single time I call a function, about whether to write a.f(b, c, ...) or f(a, b, c, ...) or that absolutely horrific syntax that ObjC has, [f a:b] or something like that. There is no reason why I should have to think about any of that. That's the compiler's job. All function calls should use the same syntax -- and that syntax should be (f a b c ...) because all those commas are unnecessary too.