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Anyone interested in playing around with Smalltalk can use https://pharo.org - I recently tried it and was pretty amazed with the quality of documentation available. It is quite a different experience working in an interactive live environment.

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I briefly looked into it, but I can't seem to figure out what to make with it. It looked like you couldn't write an application with any portability, and any user would basically have to run a smalltalk vm to use your application. Am I mistaken?

I'm no expert (not even close), but I believe they'd have to run Pharo itself, yes. So you could redistribute the Pharo runtime along with your app code (similar to, say, Python).

You may be able to build web applications too (http://seaside.st/).

This is my understanding, yes - http://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage . Some Lisp systems and the Factor language also work like this (though Factor does a lot of work to ensure that the contents of your image matches the code on disk). I believe it's possible to strip down your image for deployment so it only includes code required by your application.

Then again, we live in the era of Docker, in which it's commonplace to ship an entire Linux filesystem along with your web app. So shipping a Smalltalk VM (2.6MB for Pharo 5.0) shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

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