> To me, unreadable languages are languages that rely heavily on symbols.
Interestingly, the first Smalltalk, Smalltalk-72, used loads of symbols.[0] Introducing a new variable used an index finger symbol. Evaluating a message used an opened eyeball. The "turtle" was represented by something looking like a smiley face. There's a working emulator of Smalltalk-72 on Dan Ingalls' website, and I'd recommend playing around with it.[1] They really embraced the "everything is messages" thing, and couldn't figure out how to optimize it on their hardware (since the language is frankly way too powerful and not amenable to static analysis). If they could have seen the utility of something like a JIT, the future might have turned out differently, but as it happens, the Smalltalk variant Self was the first highly-efficient one, almost 20 years after Smalltalk-72.
Sun later cannibalized the Self team to have them focus on Java performance, and the result was the HotSpot VM, which in some ways saved Java from being a failure.
There was one Smalltalk-72 inspired implementation not created by PARC. It was based on their publications before Smalltalk-80 was released. Rosetta Smalltalk
It was supposed to be released to run on Z80 machines. Apparently it was killed when Smalltalk-80 was starting to be released (if Ted Nelson is to be believed):
Interestingly, the first Smalltalk, Smalltalk-72, used loads of symbols.[0] Introducing a new variable used an index finger symbol. Evaluating a message used an opened eyeball. The "turtle" was represented by something looking like a smiley face. There's a working emulator of Smalltalk-72 on Dan Ingalls' website, and I'd recommend playing around with it.[1] They really embraced the "everything is messages" thing, and couldn't figure out how to optimize it on their hardware (since the language is frankly way too powerful and not amenable to static analysis). If they could have seen the utility of something like a JIT, the future might have turned out differently, but as it happens, the Smalltalk variant Self was the first highly-efficient one, almost 20 years after Smalltalk-72.
Sun later cannibalized the Self team to have them focus on Java performance, and the result was the HotSpot VM, which in some ways saved Java from being a failure.
[0] http://www.esug.org/data/HistoricalDocuments/Smalltalk72/Sma...
[1] https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html