As a young Scratcher, Smalltalk was one of the first languages I tried. Before I even know emacs, or any of that stuff. It's not what I know that's getting in the way: It's what I don't know, and is never explained, because the Squeak docs are TERRIBLE. If somebody would explain how it works, I'd be willing to try. And I just got some new resources, so I'll give it a shot.
Well, that's true, the docs are terrible; you're way better off finding videos of people using the environment and eventually just learning to experiment with it. Largely what's different is that everything is live, all text is code and all code is text and you can highlight anything anywhere and execute it via either context menu or hotkeys. Pays to learn the hotkeys. Pays to learn to use hotkey for inspector and evaluator; inspectors are amazing, working with an object model without a database needing to be behind it is amazing, it lets you prototype extremely fast. And finally, the language itself is amazing as it's a programmable programming language, you can extend it to work to your will with very nice internal DSL's largely thanks to cascades and a clean anonymous function syntax.
> Maybe there's a reason Smalltalk never caught on...
There is, that wasn't it. The reason it didn't catch on was lack of a free version during the period of time it could have taken off. It cost a fortune and was competing with languages that were free to developers, Java took off instead.
I learn Smalltalk a few years ago to port a C++ interactive geometry software (http://drgeo.eu) to Squeak/Etoys then Pharo. I can testify documentation was never an issue, there are plenty of free books to learn from and a very helpful and talented community.
Smalltalk is still so revolutionary in its concepts, I am afraid you have to do your home work to get it and work on the text book.
