It's always interesting to see what proponents of other languages think about Smalltalk. I've been listening to the Ruby on Rails podcast and there are two interesting episodes that mention Smalltalk. First, there is an interview with Avi Bryant about Seaside. The audio is not terribly good in this episode but it's a good interview. The second interesting one is an interview with Bruce Tate author of Beyond Java. Some interesting quotes from this interview:

I got myself in trouble and I think that justifiably so, I said that Smalltalk was basically a train that had rusted at the station. It's been sitting in that place too long and hasn't really exploded. I've revised my view somewhat. If you look at the Smalltalk community it's a vibrant economy - it's just not growing like other things are growing. And strange and wonderful things are happening there like Seaside... and Croquet....

I think that there is something to Smalltalk but I also think that succeeding on a small scale and succeeding on a broad commercial scale only happens once every ten years or so. It might be that just like Java stole its thunder so many years ago, ir might be that Ruby is stealing the thunder right now as we speak. I mean, half a million downloads - that's a lot.

Check out the whole podcast.