[qwertyuiop924]

>Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable bit of the exploration everyone did was motivated by the fact that they were "hacking" the platform :P

Nor would I. Even at the age of 8, before I was really able to understand the code, there was a thrill to it, in a cracking-open-the-toy kind of way.

And it helps that Smalltalk does exploration better than just about any other language/environment. You can just open up any Smalltalk app and extend/take it apart using the same tools the developers did to build it.

>There seems to be a sad lack of excellent online communities nowadays; I've long looked for sites to complement HN, but without success.

Lainchan (a sort-of cyberpunk/whatever chan) is quite popular with some of the people who are here on HN. It's a very different atmosphere, but it does emphasize actual good discussion. And it's got a containment board for politics, which always helps.

At the very least, their magazine (https://lainzine.neocities.org) is worth looking at, if not for the generally interesting articles, than for the outright strangeness of a lot of it.

[i336_]

Wow, nice! At 8 (1999) I was given a probably-6-or-7-year-old 286 running DOS 3.3 with nothing on it. That got swapped for an XT a couple years later, which I discovered Qbasic on and got tangled up in for way too many years :S. Smalltalk would have been awesome to discover at that age, moreso a toy with sekret doors and passages in it for me to discover :D

I was recommended Lainchain a couple months ago, actually, but nobody mentioned the magazine, which is really cool. I am not impressed that the ASCII art generation paper in Vol.1 has any associated source code!! The rest of the magazine content and design is really interesting too.