Smalltalk a good option?

What turns people off about Smalltalk is it doesn't talk to the rest of the world the way you're used to so it takes getting used to.<p>You're certainly not going to have much luck using Smalltalk for prototyping novel image processing algorithms.

FWIW, I think Seaside with Magritte is The Way (tm) to do web apps. But you're not going to find many libraries with Smalltalk. My recommendation is to just port those to another language, then use that :)<p>I'm currently working on a port of Magritte to Perl called Ernst, and a new web framework called Kiiteh. Both are very in-progress right now, so I don't recommend even imagining that they exist. In a few months, though, that will be the One True Way. Decent language, phenomenal library support, and a nice way of easily writing web apps. :)

Qwaq, which recently raised $7M, is also Squeak/Smalltalk/Croquet:<p><a href="http://qwaq.com/company/press_releases/pr-2007_11_27.php" rel="nofollow">http://qwaq.com/company/press_releases/pr-2007_11_27.php</a><p>Qwaq has put a lot of its developments back into Croquet. A few more ventures using Squeak could cause the (already high) productivity of the environment to take off.

I can't find it in Gmail, but IIRC one of the Auctomatic guys told me they were on Seaside, and they didn't understand why the whole world wasn't on Seaside too.<p>I would be working in Seaside if I had more time, but there's the huge Rails job market, the fact that I've been working with Rails a bunch, and the fundamental fish-out-of-water feeling of being without my Unix security blanket. I'm going to the OSCON tutorial on Seaside soon, though, and Steven Baker told me he has a cool Seaside app to show off at RailsConf.<p>In addition to programming I devote serious amounts of time to acting and music. If programming were my only thing, I would be working in Seaside. I really enjoy Ruby immensely, but Seaside's very impressive. It even makes everything else look a little silly.