The short answer is yes, you need to use the environment to fully grok Smalltalk.
Much of the power of Smalltalk comes from the environment. It is pretty amazing how even now parts of Smalltalk are more sophisticated than todays programming tools.
Much of the power of Smalltalk comes from the environment. It is pretty amazing how even now parts of Smalltalk are more sophisticated than todays programming tools.
Dan Ingalls: "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.h...
Alan Kay mentions this idea in relation to Lisp and Smalltalk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQg4LquY0uU (It's buried somewhere after 24 minutes.)