Chad Perrin wrote:
> Why?  Why not just remember that it's a separate language?  I've
> experienced a little negative transferrence of knowledge between Ruby
> and Perl because of their similarities, but once I got past that minor
> hurdle my growing knowledge in each language has only helped with my
> ability to learn more about the other.  If you aren't doing the same,
> you're doing something wrong.
>   
I learn for two reasons ... either because I need to or because I want 
to. I needed to learn FORTRAN because management thought macro assembly 
was unmaintainable. I needed to learn Perl, because my "awk" scripts had 
become unmanageable and my boss said, "Perl's the best language for that 
sort of thing now." Which it was. I *wanted* to learn Lisp, Forth, R, 
and Ruby. I don't *want* to become a better Perl programmer. I just want 
to be "good enough" at it.
> Yeah, you can still run Java on a Mac.  Of course, for the purposes you
> describe, I suspect Smalltalk would have been a better choice for those
> applications in most cases.  Smalltalk is underrated and marginalized to
> the point that almost nobody thinks of it when choosing a language for a
> project, though, unfortunately.
>   
Smalltalk is a member of my list of the half dozen pivotal programming 
languages. The other five are macro assembler, Fortran, Lisp, APL and 
Forth, Smalltalk was/is truly a marvelous environment. But when these 
applications were designed, I don't think anyone was giving away a run 
time/compiler/interperter/environment for Smalltalk.

I did try Squeak at one point. I found the GUI so counterintuitive after 
years of Windows and Linux desktop usage that I gave up on it. After I 
build a couple of projects in Ruby, I might go back to Squeak. Is there 
another freely-available Smalltalk implementation?