@mattly @snarfmason that might be true nowadays but I dunno if it would have been in Smalltalk's historical context; these days being able to point to an identifier and immediately see its definition and all references is considered commonplace, but at the time it was leaps and bounds better than anything available

I would imagine going from Smalltalk to Pascal involved a pretty significant difficulty bump in terms of what you have to keep in your head at all times

more likely it's because Smalltalk self-selected for people who were willing to throw away everything they thought they knew about programming