> Ruby might superficially syntactically look like Smalltalk in a few places, but the actual semantics of the language and the overall toolset are nothing alike

> Ruby might superficially syntactically look like Smalltalk in a few places, but the actual semantics of the language and the overall toolset are nothing alike. As someone who has used cuis smalltalk (a squeak fork), and ruby, quite extensively, I would disagree. Ruby takes its entire object model (and much of its dynamism) from smalltalk. Ruby is akin to taking one part lisp, one part smalltalk, and a dash of perl and shell, throwing it into a blender and cranking the power on.