"The first Smalltalks I did used reference counting for garbage collection; probably it would have better to use something else. For a while there was a certain amount of pain associated with reference counts. But that didn’t matter—the point was the system was up and alive and running and we were learning all this other great stuff about how you put together things with objects, what it’s like to do numerics in an object-oriented style—all that other real progress."
Dan Ingalls (Coders at Work)
