Lair of the Gecko ponders languages:

I'd originally written a lengthy post denouncing the Lispers' reaction to the change, but before posting I did a little followup reading and saw that many of them are trying to organize an effort to provide solutions to the issues raised by Reddit, so I was forced to rethink and rewrite my stance. Bravo to them, and I wish them well, but for right now I just want to get some fun stuff done. For that reason, I'm leaning toward Rails . As with Lisp, I have doubts about how easy it would be to do Smalltalk/Seaside development on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux or BSD server, or two switch back and forth between Mac and PC for development.

Well, I can address that one. Both Squeak and VisualWorks are cross platform, and mostly seamlessly so. I do all the development for BottomFeeder on Windows, and packaging on my Linux box. If you go to the download page, you'll see the supported platforms - and I have users on all of them.

For server side applications, it's pretty simple. The Silt server running this site is developed on Linux and Windows (interchangeably). I deploy to Linux, but there are Windows uses of it, and I built a Windows executable for it, which works just fine - and it's all one codebase.

With Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks, you can get seamless x-platform deployments. I've got a Mac Mini I use for testing, and BottomFeeder and Silt work just fine there as well - without me ever having done anything specific to support it.