The similarities between Ruby and Smalltalk basically consist of them sharing the notion that everything is an object, every operation is (or, in the case of Ru

The similarities between Ruby and Smalltalk basically consist of them sharing the notion that everything is an object, every operation is (or, in the case of Ruby, can be) a message sent to an object. Ruby has some control structures like if, while, etc. that Smalltalk didn't, however it's got the basics (blocks, methods, classes) that allow you to directly translate Smalltalk code into Ruby (it has things like if_true, if_false, etc. that were how you did conditionals in Smalltalk, even if the idiom would be to use the special if form). Python doesn't quite fit as well, since it doesn't have arbitrary anonymous code blocks (lambdas are a bit limited), and classes aren't as open once they've been created (I think?). The big difference is that Ruby is a language that runs on regular machines, calling out to C routines to interact with an external OS, whereas Smalltalk is an integrated language and OS that run together (similar to lisp on the lisp machines).