Somewhat to the side of your comment about "do it", but my experience of working in Smalltalk is that it's amazing. The project I was working on had been in pr

Somewhat to the side of your comment about "do it", but my experience of working in Smalltalk is that it's amazing. The project I was working on had been in production sine 1996, and the Smalltalk VM it ran on dated to 1999 (Cincom bought VSE, license cost things happened), but the way Smalltalk lets you seamlessly move between writing code and exploring the state of a running system made the development process much smoother than any other system I've worked in. Also, the way (almost) everything in the VM can be extended or replaced was very useful in the context of very much legacy code in that project; there's a bug in the standard library? No problem, just patch the offending method(s) and ship the fix in the next release of the software.