I earn my bread with Pharo Smalltalk.
And I use all the modern trappings:
CI with Jenkins
Source versioned in Github
Unit tests
Used to use Java, C, C++, PHP, and some Tcl/Tk.
Smalltalk is above all of these in terms of pleasure of coding. That's factor number one for me as this is what keeps motivation high.
I've been able to be faster, with less errors, and more features than any of the aforementioned languages once I passed a given experience threshold.
Pharo works nicely with the command line and on headless servers.
One can write text files that are loaded at runtime too, so scripting it fine too.
It would be nice to have a webdav view on an image so that one could have that "files" view and edit things with Vim for example. Well, one can do that already with a git checkout, I am just speaking about doing it on a live image. There are working POCs of that (e.g. Spoon from Craig Latta) and some work is going forward in that direction as well these days.
DabbleDB was written using Seaside, a framework which ran in Squeak (and other Smalltalk implementations).
DabbleDB met with rave reviews. http://press.dabbledb.com/ Within a couple of years the company behind it were bought by Twitter (2010) and DabbleDB closed down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB Clearly Twitter didn't buy this Smalltalk company because their product was a threat to Twitter.
It may well be that there are hugely successful corporations who are using Smalltalk and keeping quiet about it. Or it may be that being a successful Smalltalk developer is a sign of being a great developer.
Pharo is the closest thing to a de facto standard. It has a huge following, perhaps even the biggest of all Smalltalk users. It's the reference implementation for Seaside, the best of the Smalltalk web frameworks. It's the reference implementation for Amber, the best of the client-side web tools. I see little reason to consider anything else.
The best part of Pharo is that you get everything from the ground up: VM code, image objects, tools, all is accessible and can be shaped to one's will.
Try to do that with Eclipse or IntelliJ's tools!
This is making one reach an understanding of the computing platform which is very beneficial in terms of mastering one's craft.
This, and also I am specifically interested in if you can do modern web development in it, and if playing with smalltalk will result in similar epiphanies that learning multiple functional languages did.
It's hard to embed in your regular flow because of the image based nature. If regular files systems and git(hub) are your thing be prepared for some drastic adjustments.
Also, it is quite slow. But it is definitely worth a look just for the added insights into what programming could be like.
