"Provably the most productive" seems to boil down to estimating that Smalltalk is more terse in statements per function point. Incidentally, by that metric Pyth

"Provably the most productive" seems to boil down to estimating that Smalltalk is more terse in statements per function point. Incidentally, by that metric Python is only half as productive as Visual Basic, which doesn't seem plausible. No comment about extra test coverage and prod bugs caused by lack of static typing. "Image-based persistence" means your production-ready code and dinking around during prototyping (in a language with frictionless monkey-patching!) are all buried in one big mutable blob. It's often argued the impedance mismatch with version control is what killed Smalltalk.