Great suggestion!
Perhaps this guy (squeaker) might have a clue on how to do it.

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/index.html


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Kay" <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 10:22 AM
Subject: Re: Learning Squeak


> Les --
>
> I think it would be great for some of the experienced Smalltalkers on
> the list to take a crack at making a "filtered Browser" for a core
> Squeak for beginners. How about ~ 100 classes to do most things? My
> personal preference would be for a set of abstractions that include
> Morphic instead of MVC, but any nice filtering would be a great
> start. To do this really nicely, it might require a few new classes
> to be made that are the higher-level abstraction for what is now
> "over subclassing" in the current system.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>
> At 1:46 PM -0800 1/19/02, Les Tyrrell wrote:
> >( 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
>
>
> --
>