[masukomi]

keep in mind that smalltalk is freaking ancient and like most useful but freaking ancient things in unix, most of the stuff "just works" and doesn't need constant poking.

Also, Smalltalk offers a much more transparent development environment. So, you're not writing code that goes into a black box and produces results. You can see what's going on in the box and make sure its doing it correctly.

also, the Squeak by example book (i think Pharo by example is a fork of this) very quickly starts showing people how to write tests. So the mentality isn't "oh, yeah, i guess i could add tests" it's "oh hey, tests are part of making smalltalk code" so you've got that going for it too.

combine those things with the smaller community, and thus a much more narrowly defined set of "needs" for a web framework and yeah, it doesn't get poked constantly.

but that's ok.