I first learned Smalltalk in the 80s after reading Smalltalk-80: The Language and Implementation. I acquired a Mac Version of Smalltalk in the late 80s and programmed a few financial simulations. I found the language useful but learning the frameworks was somewhat of a hassle.
In the past five years I have experimented with the free Smalltalk implementation squeak and found that somewhat frustrating because of version incompatibility and the general free-for-all that squeak has become.
Three months ago I found Pharo which while based on squeak took the effort to clean out much accumulated junk from squeak. In the mean time the squeak community has created a VM with at JIT compiler. And another attractive advance is seaside the web framework.So I am drawn back in to Smalltalk.
In the future I will cover my perspective on how Smalltalk is different and well and my current Smalltalk project.
