What scares you the most about the integrated IDE of most modern Smalltalks? [closed]

Everything's different. Want to go to the end of the line? It's not Ctrl-E. Want to jump a few words over, by word? It's not Meta-F....

Text editing is a fundamental programming activity. Messing with those inputs is messing with something deep in my mind.

Edit: and here is someone asking for emacs key bindings on comp.lang.smalltalk in 1987.

Nothing scares me in particular, but I found working out the API's in VW a bit of a chore, even when I had used other smalltalks. The effect of the browsers is that you tend to see the API's a little bit at a time and quite often it's not immediately obvious where you should look for particular functionality.

Smalltalk also suffers a bit from the paradigm shift to understand how it works. When I was doing my bachelor's degree at university (some time after I had first encountered Smalltalk) I got to enjoy a bit of Schadenfraude watching everyone else in the class getting over the initial paradigm hump as they learned the system (Squeak) for the first time.

I think the combination of the paradigm shift and functionality being somewhat buried in the class libraries makes for a bit of a steep learning curve. ST had a reputation for a fairly steep learning curve to really come up to speed - most of this is due to the large class libraries and the fact that most of the language functionality is buried somewhere in the libraries.

Also (and sadly), Java came along in the mid 1990s and grabbed all of the mindshare. The major Smalltalks have either died completely or been sold off to niche players. It's quite Ironic (in a happy way) that Ruby has served to re-awaken interest in Smalltalk but the lingering perception of 'also-ran' obsolescence doesn't help.

See This post of mine for some pontification about the merits (as I see them) of getting heavily involved in Smalltalk in this day and age.

I would be quite happy to go back into Smalltalk if the opportunity were to arise.

The only Smalltalk I've spent any time with is Squeak, so my views may not apply to other Smalltalk environments.

What concerns me about the image-based approach is that, while you have wonderful things in the Smalltalk environment, it is a walled garden that makes it difficult to interoperate with anything outside that environment. For example, what if I want to use external tools like Yacc and Lex? What if I want to use some C or Python programs to generate Smalltalk code? What if I want to mix Smalltalk in with a bunch of code written in other languages, editing code in all those languages in one editor and keeping it all stored in the same source-code tree?

I'm sure it's possible to deal with all these issues by having your Smalltalk environment invoke system functions to control external tools. But how easy is it to let external tools control your Smalltalk environment? In other words, what if I want Smalltalk to be just another component, rather than the master of everything?