Are you ready to code a 1 million lines of code application ? Because that is how big blender is. Sure maybe you can squeeze that because smalltalk is much less verbose than c to 250.000 lines. Are you still ready to do that ? And fight all the buginess along the way ?
Also if your goal is to teach programming then you will probably need to choose a more popular programming language as that will be the choice that your students will favor. Smalltalk as it is 10 times less popular than python (not only squeak that included the entire smalltalk products line), which means less community to ask tricky questions, less documentation which is the bread and butter for a developer and most importantly less mature libraries. Python in turn is 4 times less popular than the top Java and C .
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Of course all the above are estimates and should be taken with a grain of salt but they do reflect reality.
Personally I had to convert to Lisp for the above problems , but mind you, I still find Squeak and Smalltalk amazing for what they are and I think they are top learning tools because unlike anything out there they are user friendly and just tons of fun to use. I use emacs and silme with Lisp and I have used Eclipse and ALL the big IDEs out there, let me tell you something they are NO MATCH for smalltalk . Easily the best IDE out there. And of course I have not given up on smalltalk , this small treasure is hard to abandon. ;)
Even though creating an application like blender in smalltalk is pure insanity unless you got a big group of people to help you out, you can do tons of great stuff with squeak and as the previous poster said , there are definitely libraries out there to do the job for you. Additionally it seems that Squeak can interface relatively easy with C and that opens for you a whole galaxy of options and solves the above problems too. Unfortunately that means that you will have teach C too to your students , well at least the basic, but of course there are benefits there too since 3d and C go hand in hand.
In the end its completely up to what you want to do, in any case one thing I advice is never , never , never understimate how difficult simple things can be ;) That's what divides theory from practice ;)
Have fun and keeps us posted with your progress.
________________________________ From: "chsmith@xmission.com" chsmith@xmission.com To: beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 17:00 Subject: [Newbies] blender 3D
Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like Blender 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like to organize a school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I want to teach around creation of a software app on a large scale that is why I like blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts.
Chuck Smith _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners