I'm not really an ST fan myself. I'm not averse to it, or anything, but it has a steep learning curve, because you have to learn the class library, the IDE, and the language, and the poor tutorials and documentation make it even worse. Lisp had way better docs, and could be written in any text editor, so that's what I learned.<p>However, if you want to learn Smalltalk, might I reccomend GNU smalltalk? it's got the excellent docs you'd expect from a GNU project, unix integration, and while it does have a class browser and an image, it supports plain old text files for code, so you don't have to master an IDE if you don't want to, plus it's good for scripting. However, it has (mostly) the same class library as Squeak and other smalltalks, so it lessens the learning curve somewhat.