Hi,

there have been lots of good things said in these threads and I thought I would add a few things.

Someone mentioned that it is good to see an experienced squeaker 'drive' as an introduction to the environment.  I would have loved to have been introduced in this way.  I've not had the pleasure of watching someone at close hand, but I have trawled the internet for various web-casts of Alan Kay and others presenting at conferences and universities.  If you can watch or show some of the 'computer revolution hasn't happened yet', Stamford, and Croquet presentations 

http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html as an example

then one can get a feeling of the real sense of power and vision that is 'Squeak' - ultimately because it can be your own 'vehicle' to do whatever you want.  I try and point people in the direction of these webcasts because they do a much better job than me.  Hopefully by getting a new user excited and showing them a bit of the 'wow' they can learn to help themselves and not be so shocked by the initial experience!  I appreciate that it can be hard and frustrating at first.  I haven't seen the DVD yet (you did mention that which sounds a great intro) so I'm looking forward to it.

The presentations can be quite long, and aren't necessarily a direct introduction to Squeak, but I think it is really important to have a sense of history - maybe more so personally because I'm from a computing background that has so many established opinions about things - and a sense of the future like e-toys and Croquet.  

Demoing Croquet just blows people away.  I get people say 'So this code is Smalltalk right? and err.. why would I want to use something that old ?' - and I'm like, 'well you tell me?  here's a browser and here's the source code, here's the particle system, and this is the 3d stuff here, and oh, did I mention that this is cross-platform?'.  It pretty much stops arguments of 'you can't do that' or 'yes, but it'd be soooo slow'.  Anyway I like the argument that if you have an environment that lets you develop something as powerful as Croquet then its worthwhile learning to do something simple in it.  Squeak is an example of that in itself but I think Croquet is more tangible depending on the skill of the 'driver' :-)

>From the audio point of view, and you may have already seen these, Mark Guzdial wrote some Active Essays

http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/compMusic/ActiveEssay

which I looked at a while back.  They work on a number of levels and show many aspects of learning about sound, sound in Squeak, Squeak as an authoring environment and Squeak itself - the meta-environment.

> So, I'm wondering how to help others get over that initial shock, so they
> don't just say "what the hell is this, this looks very cryptic" and not
> dig further to find the good stuff.

I think playing in the workspace and inspectors is a great way to learn about the very minimal language syntax.  Then the realisation that (almost) any piece of text can be used to dive into the class library - since that is where the power lies.  So if you see something capitalised like a class you can highlight it and alt-b to browse the code.  or if something looks like a message sent to an object you can see if an object implements it alt-m or sends it alt-n.  The later two have been key for me in getting around the system - but it took me about a year to start using them.  I also use the debugger quite a lot to step through the actual work done by the system in evaluating an expression.  Whilst the debugger is open you can then use that to bring up more browsers and implementers/senders windows.

I hope that the people you help get over the initial shock and start grinning.  That's a sure sign that they're hooked :-)

Cheers

Mike