On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Warren Postma wrote:

> I'll confess my bias right out: I don't like Smalltalk's syntax. [yet.]
> 
> I'm a confirmed C/Delphi/Python bigot! :-)

Thinking back to when I was an absolute beginner in Smalltalk, one problem
I had was that the order of operations in the Smalltalk syntax was not
immediately intuitively obvious.  (Of course this is true to some extent
with any unfamiliar programming language.)

Even after you get past the absolute beginner stage, and on to the
intermediate-beginner stage, you might have to think for a few seconds
about the order of operations when looking at code.  (Although once you
get past this stage, that's it... you don't need to worry about an
additional 200 syntax subtleties as with, say, C++.)

If this is your problem, as an experiment you might want to play with Bob
Arning's SyntaxMorph utility.  This lets you bring up a special view on a
method which draws boxes around all of the messages, such that the order
of operations becomes immediately obvious.  You can also menu-click on
each word or phrase and see whether it's an instance variable, a message,
etc.  Using this alongside a regular browser would greatly reduce the
learning curve for absolute beginners, I'd think.

It's available at:

http://www.charm.net/~arning/SyntaxMorph.24Aug623pm.cs

(It also works in the debugger, which is a lot of fun. :-))

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI
  http://www.transom.com
  dway at mat.net, @eai.com