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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why Ruby is sometimes considered to be in the Smalltalk lineage. The syntax has some superficial similarities, but the practical use of the language is more similar to PHP.

Rails is extremely far from those dynamic Smalltalk application environments. Nothing is live. Object graphs are built up to serve a single request, then torn down immediately — a bizarre kind of kamikaze OOP. To me it's the worst of Smalltalk and PHP in one, as all the interesting aspects of dynamic typing are wasted and just become a source of bugs.

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Ruby, the language, is almost as flexible and dynamic as Smalltalk. It's just that it didn't come with an integrated graphical environment like Smalltalk.

For a glimpse of "what is possible", take a look at TkInspect (1), a set of gems that I'm working on that provide some of the goodies of that GUI, like an interactive, graphical console, a live inspector, a class browser or turtle graphics.

At the moment it's not more than a toy, but it does definitely show what can be done.

(1) https://github.com/josepegea/tk_inspect

The major similarities of Ruby and Smalltalk are semantic much more than syntactic (except perhaps for the existence of singleton classes). And as far as Rails is concerned, well, it probably wasn't written by a Smalltalker, but I fail to see how the existence of some specific framework changes how Ruby should be perceived as a language of its own.

I think most people would agree that the benefits of Smalltalk the language are inextricable from the runtime environment and GUI.

Ruby has no such thing: it's pretty much only used for Rails and plain-jane Unix scripting. It's fair to judge the language in context of its actual applications.

> I think most people would agree that the benefits of Smalltalk the language are inextricable from the runtime environment and GUI.

Most, not all: https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Over...

Although it looks like somewhere along the path with the "new" graphical browser they dropped the tag line "Smalltalk for those who can type".

Rails is a monster, and historically pretty poor ruby code quality INMHO. That said, ruby does indeed miss an "image" concept, but is quite dynamic and object oriented. Some smalltalk patterns would work well with ruby, I think.

There's also (the abandoned?) maglev ruby on top of gemstone/s object db for smalltalk.

I dunno what most people think about the benefits of Smalltalk, but I do know that people think Ruby and Objective-C are part of the Smalltalk lineage because they use the Smalltalk object model and have similar dynamic properties.

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