The best explanations of Smalltalk's productivity come from people who have used Smalltalk and mainstream languages in anger:

I just finished writing some blog software using VisualWorks Smalltalk and Seaside. It was unbelievably quick and easy - I shouldn't be too surprised, I *was* a Smalltalker for 5 years, but I last used it on a regular basis over 5 years ago. I'd forgotten how quick things can go. :) I can change some code and immediately hit refresh in the browser to see the change - and if there's a problem, I can click on debug in the web browser and immediately have a debugger up in Smalltalk to figure out the problem.

Seaside is incredible too, I picked it up very quickly reading 3 pages of overview, playing with demos, and then on to coding. There's plenty more to learn, I'm sure, but my web app is up and running with suprisingly little code. Learning/using Java frameworks was never this easy.

I've played a little with Seaside, and it does look amazing.

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