I am not actually a Smalltalk newbie, but still find it sometomes hard to get into areas I've never touched before. For some stuff that was related mostly to problems with encoding and decoding between utf-8 and utf-85 on both Windows and Linux and strange differences between these platforms, I thought I'd use something that peopl "out there" use daily. I chose python. I had never written anything in Python before, but it was easy to stipple together a few working programs. It took me just a few hours to find out about Skyper and some important language constructs and stuff. It was a pleasant journey for two reasons: * No need to learn any tools. Just an editor and a command line and you're on yur journey * You find lots of documentation and examples on the web. It feels like VB in the days: type a few keywords into your web browser and copy the sources for a 70% solution of your problem Back when I was young and cared for whether my preferred language was popular or not, I would be depressed by the experience. Remember, I tried Python because things were hard in Smalltalk. So spot the message here... ;-) Joachim