jejones@Okc-Unix (12/22/82)
From: James Jones <jejones@Okc-Unix> I wonder how much of the difference between teaching children Smalltalk and teaching them Pascal (say) is that the developers of Smalltalk did a lot of hacking to make it VERY easy to draw pretty pictures on the screen... This is not to say that there are no other factors involved. At the very least, the Algol 60 block structure, which requires declarations all together at the block head, is quite obnoxious for interactive use. (How about Algol 68? With appropriate modes for drawing pictures and making noises...) Again, note also what people have repeatedly pointed out: Smalltalk is independent from its environment. One can (and people have) implemented window-oriented systems totally apart from the language Smalltalk. James Jones P.S. Followers of these flames should look at the papers that have been written about the language Russell, which provides a good deal of the facilities that the Smalltalk fans have been discussing, in a way that provides for compile-time type checking.