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Ruby might superficially syntactically look like Smalltalk in a few places, but the actual semantics of the language and the overall toolset are nothing alike. Smalltalk was ahead of its time. The licensing and the hardware demands were too much of a burden, but the language and combined tooling solved many problems in elegant ways that today we attempt to solve with a big pile of stuff.

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> Ruby might superficially syntactically look like Smalltalk in a few places, but the actual semantics of the language and the overall toolset are nothing alike.

As someone who has used cuis smalltalk (a squeak fork), and ruby, quite extensively, I would disagree. Ruby takes its entire object model (and much of its dynamism) from smalltalk.

Ruby is akin to taking one part lisp, one part smalltalk, and a dash of perl and shell, throwing it into a blender and cranking the power on.

Integrating everything together into a complete operating environment was Smalltalk's (and Squeak's) greatest strength and greatest weakness.

It's possible to extract the language from the environment but then you end up with something that isn't nearly as amazing.

Something similar can probably be said for Oberon and for Lisp machines as well.

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