[ben-coman]

I guess it depends on the taste of the developer. I really enjoy seeing newcomers posting in the mail list saying that Pharo makes "programming fun again".

But Pharo is all about the deep integration of the tooling. Its what facilitates such a tight Code->Compile->Run->Debug cycle. It can take a while for the penny to drop. If you do a drive-by taste of Pharo you probably didn't get chance to really get into the flow.

Some say... "The only programming languages worth learning are those that change the way you think about programming." And Pharo/Smalltalk tooling does that.