The first programming language I learned almost two decades ago was Ruby, later when I explored Smalltalk which gained some popularity due to Seaside I couldn't believe how much cleaner and easier the syntax was. However the image model is a tough pill to swallow and I never wrapped my head around it despite it being the selling point for those that can take advantage of it. I also never liked that the GUI is it's own thing and always felt foreign to the system I was running on. In the past there was some headless version with some minor syntax extensions I think called Coral? which could be used ordinarily from the shell like other scripting languages but I don't know if it's still a thing and it always surprised me this path wasn't explored or pushed further to make it more popular/approachable.