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InfoQ Homepage News Article: Ruby's Roots: Smalltalk Comeback and Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk

Article: Ruby's Roots: Smalltalk Comeback and Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk

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Gartner analyst Mark Driver noted that Smalltalk might be on the verge of a comeback. One of the reasons, in his opinion:

It’s been said that a “rising tide lifts all ships”. I can see this clearly in the relationship between Smalltalk and hot topic languages such as Ruby and Python (to some degree PHP here as well). The significant growth that we see among these languages is also causing a few to take a second look at Smalltalk as well.

Mark continues with the recommendation:

If you are BIG fan of dynamics languages (closures, meta programming, and all that cool stuff) then consider giving Smalltalk a look. You might like what you see. Its like Ruby but with bigger muscles. You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside.

With this in mind, we took a closer look at Smalltalk, how it influenced Ruby, and what it offers over Ruby. We also talked to Randal L. Schwartz, who's been providing training for Smalltalk for some time and is on the leadership team of Squeak.

Read "Ruby's Roots: Smalltalk Comeback and Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk".

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