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DaemonR wrote:The reasons why you learn a spoken language and why you learn a programming language are completely different. You learn a spoken language to communicate with people, you learn a programming language because it's practical or for learning experience.

Communicating with people is practical. When I came to the US for the first time English was very, very practical. My life depended on it. And it still does, but there's a world of difference between the amount of effort needed back then and now. It's become much, much easier.

You get learning experience with every new thing you learn. You also learn stuff for fun.

I learned programming for fun. At the beginning I did not even think of making it my career, something practical. I just enjoyed it. So far I've never had real practical need to speak Spanish as I don't live or work with people who only speak Spanish. But I learned it nonetheless. And then I went on to learn a bit of and about other languages. Why do I need all that if Russian and English are enough for me ~99% of the time? 'cause it's fun!

DaemonR wrote:Regardless, it even deters people from learning spoken languages. Eg. A lot of people give up on learning Mandarin because the same words can have entirely different meanings just by slight differences in intonation.

True, there are some quite unconventional things that are hard to master when you need to obtain a lot of new knowledge and acquire new skills and when very little can be transferred from the past experience.

iansjack wrote:

The old code doesn't just disappear

Well, in Smalltalk that's exactly what happens. As there is no reference to it the garbage collector will free the memory. This doesn't happen in C because there is no garbage collection..

If the language has garbage collection, then I retract my statement about un-referenced code. I've worked with Basic, VB, C, C++, C#, Python, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, Clisp, Z80/MIPS R4300/X86 assembly, and many other lesser scripting languages; on top of spending a lot of time studying the paradigms of various programming languages. SmallTalk just happens to be one I never looked into, so I may be looking at this completely biased.

There's a difference between using unfamiliar syntax and unnecessarily complicated syntax.

Rusky wrote:There's a difference between using unfamiliar syntax and unnecessarily complicated syntax.

And I even know one example, it is called "Brainfuck". But I'm not sure everybody should learn it.

However, when a designer thinks about new language there is a goal in his mind and it is much better to discuss the goal than some particular quirks of the language syntax. But the goal is missing, then we are discussing some quirks.

good language ...

Appears to be a very nice mixture of languages ​​derived from C with SmallTalk, but a great heritage of SmallTalk...

I have thousands of lines of code written in SmallTalk in VisualWorks...
But I always wanted something like what your language offers!

Perfect!!!!!!!