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No he means specifically with respect to Lispiness, what does Ruby have that Smalltalk doesn't. I thought of a few different answers, and then I found them all in Smalltalk, so I think GP is right, on both the OO and FP front, Ruby is pretty much just Smalltalk.


1) Extremely good developer community/support (gems, the #ruby channel on irc.freenode.net, blogs, books, etc.) Just a shit-ton of smart people.

2) Pure command-line interface that works with text files, that makes it work easily with any toolchain. Seems that GNU Smalltalk is the first version which only recently did not require an IDE.

3) All the basic and most useful objects are literals. Enumerators are stupid-easy to use.

4) Much lower learning curve than Smalltalk.

5) Adopts some useful Perlisms into the language mix.

6) A large focus on unit testing, and TDD. And they are very easy to use.


I agree with all of that, and that each of those matter, but those things don't make it Lispier than Smalltalk is...




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