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Maybe it's just his tone that rubbed the wrong way. The entire article reminded me of some superbowl commercial where everyone's posteriors were dispensing advi

• stcredzero 18y ago
  Not only that, but he's revealing his ignorance of how the VMs in question differ. The 1.8 Matz VM traverses a partial Abstract Syntax Tree to interpret. The Gemstone VM is JIT-ing. On top of that, it has better GC. Oh, this is really rich: "However, it seems to me that Smalltalk is far less flexible than Ruby, while being semantically much more machine-friendly." (From the comments.) From my comments: "Oh, and “Smalltalk is less flexible than Ruby?” Uh, no. Any serious language maven will tell you that they are almost identical in many respects, but that Smalltalk wins because you can not only modify the entire library, you can refactor base classes completely out of existence, and you can arbitrarily change the grammar. (And there’s even more!) This is precisely why it’s relatively easy to put Ruby on top of the Smalltalk VM. If you can bootstrap a Ruby parser into a Smalltalk image, the Smalltalk image can incrementally morph itself into Ruby. (And another goal of the Rubinius project is to give Ruby the same level of meta-capabilities already present in Smalltalk!)" PWNED! EDIT: Okay, Sho has changed his tone in his latest comments. I think he just blogged off the cuff and didn't realize how widely read his blog post might be. He even says he's going to check out Smalltalk.