<p>My questions is simple!</p>

<ol>
<li>Would you start learning Smalltalk if you had the time? Why? Why not?</li>
<li>Do you already know Smalltalk? Why would you recommend Smalltalk? Why not?</li>
</ol>

<p>Personally I'm a Ruby on Rails programmer and I really like it. However, I'm thinking about Smalltalk because I read various blogs and some people are calling Ruby something like "Smalltalk Light". The second reason why I'm interested in Smalltalk is <a href="http://seaside.st" rel="noreferrer">Seaside</a>.</p>

<p>Maybe someone has made the same transition before?</p>

<p><strong>EDIT:</strong> Actually, what got me most excited about Smalltalk/Seaside is the following Episode of WebDevRadio: <a href="http://www.webdevradio.com/index.php?id=77" rel="noreferrer">Episode 52: Randal Schwartz on Seaside (among other things)</a></p>

I was taught Smalltalk in one of the first graduate college level Object-Orient Programming courses (circa 1988).  The teacher thought it best to start was a "pure" OO langauge,before moving on to a more trendy one (we did a bit of C++ at the end of the semester).
By that measure, it's still best to start with pure OO, although these days we have Java & C#, both of which are "nearly-pure" OO -- close enough that you can get by ignoring the non-OO features of them, and limiting yourself to the Pure-OO subset of the langauges.