I saw a message flash by on Twitter earlier today:

What's the best desktop scripting language for woking with http, REST and XML?

The conventional wisdom is that something like Perl, Python, or Ruby would be simplest, and that Smalltalk is "too big". But is it really? I've just fired up a base Smalltalk image, and loaded in the network client code. It's consuming 16.5 MB.... and my MacBook Pro has 4 GB.

So is that really heavy? Which is going to be more productive - writing some scripting code in a text file and trying to run it until it works, or writing Smalltalk in a workspace and using the debugger and inspector to help make it work?

Heck, if you're truly against having the environment running to do "simple" tasks, just write some Smalltalk code in a text file and do this:

visual visual.im -fileIn myScript.st

You can download Cincom's Smalltalk right here.