James McGovern asks:

I wonder if James Robertson would care to comment on why StrongTalk is the best version of Smalltalk available and is of higher quality than Ruby on Rails?

Well, first off, Cincom Smalltalk is the best version of Smalltalk to get started with. StrongTalk is an unfinished prototype, not a product you could actually use to build deployable software. There are ideas in Strongtalk that might well be worth integrating into Cincom Smalltalk, but that's about it.

As to Rails - I haven't worked with it, so I can't comment on it specifically. People I respect like it, so I'm not going to go negative. However, I will say this: Cincom Smalltalk has a far, far better set of development tools available for it than Ruby does, including tools that enable Enterprise integration - MQS, a full WS* stack, COM integration (on Windows), a .NET connection (again, on Windows), and CORBA (cross platform).

But hey - don't take my word for it. Grab the latest non-commercial product, and try it for yourself. I'm planning a series of "getting started" screencasts, which should make the "I've got it downloaded, now what?" questions easier to answer.

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