Rob Fahrni asks:

The question is, how does an old dog such as myself get immersed in the gospel of yet another language? You can say all you want about Microsoft but you have to admit their developer tools are solid if nothing else. I know IronPython exists for the .Net framework but what about Ruby and Smalltalk implementations? I'm spoiled to Visual Studio.Net, it's so nicely integrated, and just works. I've really come to appreciate VS.Net now that I'm spending my days on a Linux box, you have no idea how pathetic the tools are on Linux.

Well, here's what I used to do, fwiw: I'd take a problem I had solved in my first programming language (Basic) and write the same application in the new language. That way, I wasn't trying to understand the domain problem, I was just learning the new language. It wasn't a hard problem it was a manual cryptogram solver (for the puzzles that still appear in some newspapers). I wrote that in Basic, in UCSD Pascal, in a proprietary language at the DoD, in C, and finally in Smalltalk. I stayed in Smalltalk after I finished the problem in less time than it had taken me to go over syntax in the other languages I had learned :)

As to the question about .NET integration - there are no shipping Smalltalks on that platform - a large part of the problem is that the CLR just isn't ready for a language like Smalltalk (at least not yet). As to tools sucking on Linux - that's not true if you use something like VisualWorks - which is binary portable across every platform we support :) I do my BottomFeeder work mostly on Windows, but I do all the blog server development on Linux - and on an old PII 400! Try running any of the supposedly "modern" development systems on that :)