After pounding at the system and countless books/articles/keynotes, I get that Smalltalk is a vision, not a syntax. Fortunately, I was hooked from the beginning by Alan Kay's TED Talk, so I enthusiastically pushed through the pain of adapting to the image, losing my vi bindings, etc. If it was only about syntax, without the live, open, dynamic, turtles-all-the-way-down system, I would probably use Ruby, which has more of the libraries I need and want (although I would definitely miss passing blocks as any argument, and keywords are nice).
*However*, like any "blue plane" idea, there are people that don't get it (and actually /can't/ get it) and want to relate to Smalltalk as "a language with cool syntax", giving up the productivity of a live environment. This is the nature of paradigm shift. Now, while I feel bad that those people are totally missing out on the magic, if they are willing to join our community and contribute to the libraries, fix bugs, user test, etc., let's welcome them with crappy (i.e. standard) tools and reap the benefits of more pairs of hands and eyes. I'm sure it won't be long before they are pair programming with or watching someone at ESUG/Smalltalks/STIC who "gets it". When they start zipping through senders and implementors, inspecting live objects, and opening debuggers, I'm sure many will start to understand. Not all popcorn kernels pop at the same time. Hopefully, one of the converts will finally implement vi bindings in the image development tools before I get around to doing the work ;-) Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Misc-newbie-questions-tp4268310p4301259.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
