Wow, nice! At 8 (1999) I was given a probably-6-or-7-year-old 286 running DOS 3.3 with nothing on it. That got swapped for an XT a couple years later, which I discovered Qbasic on and got tangled up in for way too many years :S. Smalltalk would have been awesome to discover at that age, moreso a toy with sekret doors and passages in it for me to discover :D
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.
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.