Hi, Chris -

>In the ACM's 2nd take at the History-of-Languages, I think there was an
>article by Adele Goldberg (I never saw it in print, but saw a draft
>beforehand at PPS), in which she said this ..., and that ..., and
>concluded, if my memory serves me, with the idea that using Smalltalk can
>be FUN.

I don't have Adele's article at hand, but the citation has a familiar ring.
The concluding paragraph of the Smalltalk-76 paper makes the statement:

"Programming in Smalltalk is fun. On the one hand, the act of assembling expressions into statements and then into methods is not very different from conventional programming.  On the other hand, the experience is totally different, for the objects which populate and traverse the code are active entities, and writing expressions feels like organizing trained animals rather than pushing boxes around."

[The full text is at http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/ ]

>That was "right-on", but perhaps a tactical error.
>
>Experience was led me to the conviction that your average managerial-type
>-- certainly corporate, possibly even in research -- can not stomach the
>idea that engineers or programmers could be having FUN while working for
>them. 
>
>I joke not. Smalltalk is one of the worst languages / environments in this
>respect, precisely because it can be so empowering. (This is more serious
>even than having fun, so to avoid the above mentioned tactical error, I
>won't go into it any further here.)

More serious even than having fun?  Whoa baby!

I'm not so worried about tactical errors.  Think of it as art rather than as a crusade.

My answer to the tactical dilemma is in another concluding paragraph...

    http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html

	- Dan

PS:  I don't mean to make light of the problem of making Squeak be respected.  It's just that the only thing I know to do about the problem is to return to the task of making it worthy of respect, and that is basically art.

[Thanks, Dwight, for putting the papers online]