[Jtsummers]

Smalltalk, my experience has mostly been with the Squeak and Pharo variants. It hits everything on your list, in my opinion.

[Qem]

I second this recommendation. Squeak and Pharo are awesome, not limited to text, and have fast virtual machines.

[igouy]

> fast virtual machines

Compared to what? To do what?

[Qem]

Well, compared to popular dynamic languages with similar levels of abstraction, like Python or Ruby. Squeak was just released with SistaV1, so I think the speculative inclining JIT is just around the corner. While using Pharo, I'm used to get code running 2-3 faster than the equivalent in Python.

[igouy]

> popular dynamic languages with similar levels of abstraction

JavaScript?

[worthless-trash]

Man i wish I could really understand pharoh.

[nickd2001]

The freely available book "Pharo by example" I found good to learn from, a few years ago. Smalltalk is an enormously powerful language but initially it can feel "the wrong way round" like driving on the other side in a foreign country . You can get used to that though, and its worth it. I think in the years since I learned Smalltalk via Pharo, its got a bit bloated with features, so Squeak might also be worth a look for trying out simple things to learn.

[worthless-trash]

Thank you for the advice, I'll look into it.

[znpy]

one of the most annoying things about smalltalk/pharo is that the "marketing" tell you it's simple and the syntax fit in a sheet of paper, yet all the times i tried to try it i had to go through a lot of pharo introductory tutorial before i could even start to type an "hello world".

needless to say I got bored ad moved on.

[igouy]

With any programming language there's a lot of introductory tutorial before we even start to type "hello world".

    ~$ ./visual ./visualnc64.im -nogui -doit "Stdout nextPutAll: 'hello world'; cr. ObjectMemory quit"

hello world

    ~$

— or something like —

    $ cat hello.st
    Stdio stdout 
        nextPutAll: 'hello world'; 
        nextPut: Character lf.!
    SmalltalkImage current snapshot: false andQuit: true!

    $ bin/pharo --headless Pharo10-SNAPSHOT-64bit-502addc.image hello.st

[scroot]

`Transcript show: 'Hello, World'`

Not especially complex syntax. It just doesn't have a lot in common with languages with Algol-like syntax