I've never understood why Ruby is sometimes considered to be in the Smalltalk lineage. The syntax has some superficial similarities, but the practical use of the language is more similar to PHP.
Rails is extremely far from those dynamic Smalltalk application environments. Nothing is live. Object graphs are built up to serve a single request, then torn down immediately — a bizarre kind of kamikaze OOP. To me it's the worst of Smalltalk and PHP in one, as all the interesting aspects of dynamic typing are wasted and just become a source of bugs.
Rails is extremely far from those dynamic Smalltalk application environments. Nothing is live. Object graphs are built up to serve a single request, then torn down immediately — a bizarre kind of kamikaze OOP. To me it's the worst of Smalltalk and PHP in one, as all the interesting aspects of dynamic typing are wasted and just become a source of bugs.