I don't think "smalltalk was taught 50 years ago" is a good argument. When I was a kid we used MSX machines with no storage.. your program would be just gone at

I don't think "smalltalk was taught 50 years ago" is a good argument. When I was a kid we used MSX machines with no storage.. your program would be just gone at the end of the lesson (or if you messed your POKE's). If you wanted to save, you copied code to your notebook. Were we able to get things done as middle-school students? Yes. Would I recommend this environment to anyone else today? No. And yes, I get this, if you have on-call expert for student classes (preferably principal architect of the system), then you can use Smalltalk. But I've never seen "on-call experts" at any time during the university... the closest thing is sometimes there are TAs during labs, but those TAs are just slightly older students. What would that girl do if Daniel were not around? Would she have to reset the environment and lose all of her work? (For comparison, later on we got PCs with MS-DOS. I've crashed those machines so many times with all sorts of crazy or stupid code.. and I never needed anyone's assistance to recover - hit RESET, wait for machine to reboot, reopen your files..)