( In Noel's reply, Lex wrote: )
> > The hard parts of Smalltalk are things like OO design, the code browser,
> > the way collections and streams work, and so on -- not the syntax.

Definitely.  When you've stripped away all the other ways to make a
programming environment complex, this is all that is left.  There is nothing
in the programming environment to stand between you and the core concepts in
the object-oriented approach to programming.  While these should be natural
enough to understand, it seems that for many people these things are still
hard to grasp at first, irregardless of the language used to express them.
But I would still definitely prefer to reccomend Smalltalk as the language of
choice for this.

> Which gets us full circle back to the original point:
>
> > [The] lack of really good tutorials geared to take existing
> > C(++)/Pascal/Java programmers (or any programmer for that matter) from
> > newbie to mastery is one of the most significant failings.
>
> You made too much out of the "odd syntax", which was in quotes in the first
> place to represent it as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment.  Odd?  LISP
> (which I loath) and APL (which I love) are odd, not Smalltalk.
>
> > It's taken me years to learn Smalltalk, too
>
> It shouldn't, but look how many times that's been said recently.

Keep in mind that many of us have said it in the context of Smalltalk not
being available to mere mortals shortly after being publicly announced.  It
took me years to learn because first there was no way to learn except to read
about it, and then because I could not afford to buy a computer to run it on
when commercial versions did become available.  Once I had both of those
things, it went relatively smoothly.  Perhaps it is better to mention that,
based solely on what I had read in 1981, I was willing to put the effort into
learning as much as I could long before it was even possible for me to use it.
I bought Digitalk's Smalltak/V for DOS and a Logitech mouse years before I
ever owned a computer myself- the same is also true of V/286 and V/PM.   In
the early years I could only play with these versions for a few minutes at a
time on a computer owned by a friend, or in computer stores, or ( much
later ), in campus computer labs.  So it isn't exactly a fair assessment to
take these anecdotes as being indicative of the expected learning curve!

However, I do sometimes feel that in other ways I had an advantage over
today's newcomers- V/DOS only had about 90 classes visible to the programmer.
V/286 ( I believe ) had fewer than 300.  It was *much* easier to get a grasp
of the important, useful classes in such a smaller system.  I would not want
to learn by wading through the thousands of classes that are more typical now,
wondering which of those many hundreds of classes are *really* essential to
getting things done for the problems I want to solve.   In that sense, I could
believe that learning Smalltalk has become much harder.   But, you can only
learn something for the first time once in your life.  So, I'd have to hear
more from the "newbies" about what they encountered in discovering and
learning Smalltalk to pass any further judgement on that.

- les