One problem GNU Smalltalk addresses for me is "getting started" because it mostly takes tooling out of the equation. Mostly because my experience was of normal install a new programming language and integrate it with my current tools hiccups. But there was not an entire alien landscape filled with many overlapping windows as with Pharo or Squeak. I can focus on learning the language and its semantics without orthogonal cognitive loads. I think this helps me more readily achieve flow.

Part of what made a sustained attempt at learning Smalltalk difficult for me was that traditional Smalltalk IDE's did not allow me to approach Smalltalk as just another programming language living in the same Turing tarpit as Awk or Perl or Python. Smalltalk IDE's make a set of design decisions that embody a particular philosophy regarding the "best way to use a computer" rather than "here is another way to use a computer." They are not the best way for me to use one.