Squeak

I've been pondering between learning squeak and python. Python seem to be very capable and widely used, so it has a lot of decent prebuilt and free libraries and decent tutorials. On the other hand, squeak, which is an implementation of the smalltalk language, seem to be more elegant on the fundamental level despite its relatively paltry community (no offense here, the quantity doesn't represent quality) and smaller third party support (which is evident in the fact that I had a relatively hard time trying to find a decent artificial life or physics related introductory tutorial of the language/IDE, while I practically ran into one of those every five seconds while browsing for python resources). Most programmers would recommend python to me... The problem is that I myself am not a programmer. I don't need to earn a living programming, and I'm (usually) not under a tight deadline and limitations on what I can and can't do with a programming language. In that light, squeak, with its integration to graphic environment for quick visual prototyping (for swarm simulation for example) is very attractive... Yet should I ever consider the possibility of doing hevay duty programming for artificial life or mathematical simulation purposes I'm not quite sure if squeak can handle it as easily as an equivalent python implementation.... Choices choices.

Strangely enough though, I'm finding python itself to be a lot more easier to understand compared to squeak. Maybe it had to do with how I first started my programming experience with C/C++. I can already write a simple mathematical simulation program for elemental fractal simulation, while I'm still a bit confused between all the three button mouse schemes and menu items in squeak. While I can write something in python however, I had quite a trouble making a graphical output of the fractal algorithm, which I believe would be a lot simpler in squeak once I get past all the menus and button confusions (seeing that a simple swarm simulation algorithm and graphic output in squeak takes about 15 minutes to implement... Which is not quite the case for python, although I might be simply because of my lack of skill in the art of programming).

Again, I am quite lost, and don't know what to do. Both the python and the squeak language seem to have some nice things going for them... To be honest, I'm leaning toward squeak, but its unfamiliar interface is putting me off somewhat, and the uncertainty in what I can do with the language in the future doesn't really help things either.


Well, I guess I should be glad that I at least narrowed down my choice to one of the two programming language/environment. I was wondering between half a dozen languages before this.