[jcromartie]

I can't answer for agavin here, but I can tell you one reason why I write more code in Ruby than in Smalltalk: integration.

Smalltalk, more than Lisp or Java, is just not suited to little programs that get the job done. It is really great for rapid development of things that live in the Smalltalk image and play with other Smalltalk objects... but stepping outside of those boundaries is often painful and frustrating. Squeak, for example, is plagued by arcane and undocumented classes for socket I/O or HTTP.

It just feels like its own isolated world compared to a simple Ruby hashbang script that reads from stdin and writes to stdout.

[nickthedart]

Thank you. :) As a fan of PG's articles regarding language power, I've wondered why he didn't make more comparisons of other languages to Smalltalk (whether positive or negative)