I played around with Squeak over Christmas (basically trying to implement a ray tracer, although I started to lose interest after I rolled my own Matrix impleme

I played around with Squeak over Christmas (basically trying to implement a ray tracer, although I started to lose interest after I rolled my own Matrix implementation with all the transforms). As far as working with the code, debugging, reading and writing were concerned, it was great. It really gave me a taste for thoughtful OOP, simple documentation, and even TDD-style development again, because the whole environment just worked perfectly for it in a way that would be hard to reproduce in a traditional language where you're organising things on the file system. Dealing with version control was a little more awkward (getting Git in place), and I'm glad I didn't have to worry about deployment or any kind of maintenance. Possibly GNU Smalltalk would be an ideal middle-ground there. It's also one of the few occasions where I've not really had to rely on the internet so much to get help when I need it. It's been enough to have a book on Smalltalk and to rely on the documentation in the IDE.