True, too true, but it does ease people into the language and proves the language is not defined by the implementation. This is important since most of the discussion in this thread is based on the common implementation and not the language.
Usually I am the first to push for comments "Language != Implementation", however the whole Smalltalk experience only makes sense in the official implementation of the IDE married with the language and OS.
Using an implementation like GNU Smalltalk, while valid in terms of language implementation, leaves out the whole development experience back to the stone age of UNIX tools.
Exactly the development experience of environments inspired by Smalltalk is what made me always favor IDEs over vim, emacs + CLI.
and usually I will defend the different environments, but I have to disagree with you here. Smalltalk environments try to build their own everything. Squeak and Visual Works do not use native widgets, heck Squeak is a horrible UI. Both have editors that are inferior to current text editors. They have cool attributes, but there rejection of every part of the OS is problematic.
