Programmers need to stop listening to obnoxious people who are proudly destroying our industry while simulataneously farming our anxiety for attention and validation.
Software enegineering is not the kind of field that should require adoption of some universal coping mechanism. The fact that you're suddenly bing told to adapt to something harming you should raise all kind of qustions and red flags.
>GNU Smalltalk turned out to be the perfect dialect for this first contact with Smalltalk, offering a very traditional command-line experience. And Vim provided the syntax highlighting I needed to write those initial lines of code.
Sorry, but if you're using VIM and command line, you're missing all of the best parts of Smalltalk. It's like trying to learn HTML/CSS by designing web pages in Word.
If you want to see what the fuss is really all about, you should download a standalone Pharo VM and latest stable image: https://pharo.org/download
It instantly gives you everything you need to learn and develop things with a modern IDE. It has Playground (better REPL), the famed debugger, the code explorer and a bunch of other things.
Then buy The Blue Book on Ebay (Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation). Absolutely worth it. Yes, even now. Yes, even if you don't plan to use SmallTalk.
If you need help, join Pharo Discord or use the mailing list.
The IT industry doesn't really need "programmers". It needs people who build quality software systems. There is a difference.
The essential skill to look for is the ability to imagine some system working differently from how it works right now. A good engineer should be able to imagine several novel, alternative states and compare them, thinking of various consequences and trade-offs.
Software enegineering is not the kind of field that should require adoption of some universal coping mechanism. The fact that you're suddenly bing told to adapt to something harming you should raise all kind of qustions and red flags.