>BTW: I'm asking the English native speakers here: did aou ever encounter a
>foreign language _by far_ as easy to learn as smalltalk -- because that's
>actually what it should be compared to:learning a foreign language.

Yes, German.  Having a bit of familiarity with old english, as well as
latin, and some french already, I found Germans spoke exactly the right word
in the right place, and after a few courses most things in the grammar made
perfect sense to me. I also liked the way it sounded.  We've even borrowed a
few into English; words like "Angst" and "Kindergarten". 

The programmer-like way Germans have coined new words by taking several
words and removing the spaces [fügenSieDieWörterSoZusammen] seemed to me an
open invitation to do the same. An extensible language. Cool.
 
It reminds me of when I first learned Pascal: I used to try to think of new
and useful words I could make do new and useful things in all my programs
[functions and procedures].  The leap from Procedural to plain-OOP was very
non-interesting to me since my procedural style already included
polymorphism and base classes, I just thought of them as "plug in points and
callbacks".   Then I found Delphi.  Delphi upped the ante by promoting
"Parts" programming rather than merely OOP.

Plain old object are just procedures with data unless you can connect em up
without code. You need interfaces, attributes, and connectable events, and
black-box encapsulation. I love Parts.  Objects? Just an incremental
stepping stone towards Parts. The neat thing about Smalltalk was that Parts
were possible even though not yet implemented.  You can implement parts in
any procedural or OOP language but the nicest Parts I've seen are in Visual
Age Smalltalk . You can even wire them together.  

Is anyone working on a Parts/Wiring metaphor for Squeak?  Is there anything
out there that might get me on my way with this?

Anyone remember a program from the 80's called Rocky's Boots? It was a
boolean logic teaching game.  You could wire AND, OR, NOT, and XOR gates
together to see what would happen.

:-)

Warren