[emaringolo]

That depends a lot on your background and interests.

But if you like dynamic languages, and being highly productive with a "years ahead" development environment, then Pharo is a good alternative.

Many of the features you see added today to mainstream IDEs, have a background in Smalltalk. Even in Chrome Debugger the "code hot swap" is a showcase feature, whilst Smalltalk have it since decades.

And of course, Smalltalk provides features that no other environment/languages provides yet. So if you want to take advantage of those now, instead of waiting for them reaching mainstream, then it matters to use it now.

Features like those provided by Moose (http://moosetechnology.org/) will take years to be available as an Eclipse Plugin. :)