Oh I was very much in love with Smalltalk since like 20 years ago. I just never became a Smalltalk developer because back then companies were switching from Smalltalk to Java and my personal projects didn't work well with Smalltalk.

I wanted beautiful native UIs, make computer games or small Unix text processing utils. Smalltalk didn't quite fit either of those interests and the Smalltalk landscape was so fractured.

My first Smalltalk was Dolphin Smalltalk which was quite cool, but when I switched to Mac later I didn't really find a good alternative.

Besides Objective-C was for me a sort of okay compromise. It gave some aspects of Smalltalk while you could use it to make actual native UIs with high performance. Not to mention it tied in with an OS. Like so much on macOS is Objective-C based.

And you got Objective-S which is a Smalltalk built on top of the Objective-C runtime: http://objective.st/Examples/

It is what I was always hoping Apple would do but instead we got Swift. Swift is okay but it would have been better with a modern Smalltalk.

I do still keep a bit up to date. I wrote this article about Pharo Smalltalk: https://erikexplores.substack.com/p/what-makes-smalltalk-unique

I have not used it extensively myself but I have spent time talking to Pharo users to understand their experience.

I will look forward to reading your Smalltalk experience. Still think Smalltalk is very cool but the train has sort of left the station years ago for me. Julia has been my programming passion for almost a decade now.

Most relevant for me would be to use something like Objective-S as alternative to Swift for making Mac GUI applications.