I'm a new comer to Smalltalk, and learned it in Squeak. But I find many things confusing in Smalltalk. In Squeak, MetaClass and MetaClass class are each other's class mutually. If I want to create the object MetaClass I should send a message new to its class which is MetaClass class. But it must have already existed as an object in the first place to accept the message. So I must create the object MetaClass class first, which can only be done by sending a message new to the object MetaClass which has not been created yet. So it is a chicken-or-the-egg problem.
Of course I can create the objects in Squeak now, because the MetaClass and MetaClass class objects have already been created auto-magically when Squeak is opened. But I don't know how. Maybe they are created somehow rather by sending messages. But then it contradicts Smalltalk's spirits: everything happens by sending messages except a few points (variable declaration, assignments, returns and primitives).
Is there something wrong with the above reasoning? Thanks in advance.
The 'automagically created' process actually is called bootstrapping. This is how the chicken-and-egg problem gets solved. Once the system is bootstrapped, all the rest can be expressed in terms of the system itself. So, there is no contradiction with Smalltalk's philosophy that everything happens by sending messages because it only becomes a Smalltalk system once it's bootstrapped.