Nor would I. Even at the age of 8, before I was really able to understand the code, there was a thrill to it, in a cracking-open-the-toy kind of way.
And it helps that Smalltalk does exploration better than just about any other language/environment. You can just open up any Smalltalk app and extend/take it apart using the same tools the developers did to build it.
>There seems to be a sad lack of excellent online communities nowadays; I've long looked for sites to complement HN, but without success.
Lainchan (a sort-of cyberpunk/whatever chan) is quite popular with some of the people who are here on HN. It's a very different atmosphere, but it does emphasize actual good discussion. And it's got a containment board for politics, which always helps.
At the very least, their magazine (https://lainzine.neocities.org) is worth looking at, if not for the generally interesting articles, than for the outright strangeness of a lot of it.
I was recommended Lainchain a couple months ago, actually, but nobody mentioned the magazine, which is really cool. I am not impressed that the ASCII art generation paper in Vol.1 has any associated source code!! The rest of the magazine content and design is really interesting too.
I suspect the reason Scratch felt slow to me is that 2.0 is some kind of HTML5 and/or Flash mess now - you're right, Smalltalk is really fast. I spun up Squeak to check something on this T43 yesterday, and everything was really snappy. I have no reason to expect Scratch will be any slower.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable bit of the exploration everyone did was motivated by the fact that they were "hacking" the platform :P
There seems to be a sad lack of excellent online communities nowadays; I've long looked for sites to complement HN, but without success.
I just had a look at Snap! which is interesting. It definitely flatlines this laptop though, I had to try it on a faster machine. But I'm running the tree animation demo right now, and it looks awesome....