I think the apparent contradiction is because you're subconsciously imposing your own ideas on the post, and those contradict what he's saying. 1. He didn't sa

I think the apparent contradiction is because you're subconsciously imposing your own ideas on the post, and those contradict what he's saying. 1. He didn't say Smalltalk's syntax was learnable — he said it was "readable". He'd probably agree that it's more learnable too, but his actual claim was more like "It's easier to mentally tokenize code that uses spaces to separate elements than code that uses dots." This is similar to how many Rubyists feel that using whitespace instead of parens can make code more readable. 2. He acknowledged that it will be awkward if you're already well-versed in languages that do things differently. But this is tautological. Attacking a programming language for being different from other programming languages is a lot silly. 3. It is true that Smalltalk's pervasive object-orientation will be unfamiliar for people whose experience is limited to Algolish languages, but continuing off 2, that isn't really a bad thing. Smalltalk's model is more consistent than Ruby's. There are basically two things in the whole language: message sends and variable definitions. Your objection here isn't that there's a new abstraction, but that there isn't anything new — it's objects all the way down. It's new to you because you know Ruby, but it's not really a new thing in the course of learning Smalltalk.