[seandenigris]

Smalltalk is great (mostly for historic reasons these days)

In my experience coming to Pharo Smalltalk after a 15 year journey through C, C++, VB, PHP, ObjC, and Ruby (my second favorite lang), I can say that none of the reasons I find Smalltalk awesome are historical. This idea that one should "learn Smalltalk to bring those lessons with you to the language you 'really' plan on using" is a silly idea, often repeated.

Most importantly, Smalltalk is an environment, not a language...

The Smalltalk community is full of talented developers doing cutting edge research and serious commercial applications. We use Smalltalk, for example, because its live, open, dynamic environment makes it a joy to use and blows productivity through the roof. Having complete control over the IDE is a dream - as a small example, when I got tired of constantly navigating to my default code directory, I added a default setting to Pharo Smalltalk, in about 5 minutes, so I and every other user could benefit. This kind of enhancement is routine because it's so damn easy! Even in Ruby, it's a hassle to dig through a lib's source files and find the code to edit. In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?!

[vidarh]

Ruby is a language, not an environment. So why are you comparing Smalltalk environment to a language? (this applies largely to the original article as well - if you want to compare languages, compare languages; if you want to compare environments, compare environments).

There are Ruby environments that provide fairly deep introspection and live changes to a system, like Pry. It's just not the main way of doing things. For a reason: It's not the way most developers are used to working.

[seandenigris]

You are asking to force the question into an artificially created box that doesn't help us get to the truth. The Smalltalk experience is naturally - and more fairly - compared to Ruby as an experience.

They are both tools, and thus we're primarily concerned with their utility, not inherent value. One wants to know: how will these tools help me to achieve my goals. The answer is that the turtles-all-the-way-down experience of Smalltalk helps devs achieve those goals more quickly, easily, and joyfully.

p.s. Thanks for pointing out Pry! I didn't know about it and it looks really cool :) As it relates to this conversation though, a more-advanced repl is stone-age technology.

[mattbriggs]

>> In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?!

VB6?