Who does these days?

I dabble in SmallTalk for hobby stuff, and it actually seems to be the other way around these days: People find SmallTalk after becoming enamored with Ruby. That's definitely my story.

It's how I found SmallTalk back in the original pickaxe days, and Lisp, and Perl. Pretty serious expansion of consciousness compared to Basic, Pascal & C++.

Similar. I found small talk from Objective-C and Ruby.

The people who are going to save us when all the newer generations know how to do is describe their desired outcome to a machine and get slop output.

I can't say smalltalk is popular even among this crowd.

I've been teaching a teenager how to code with smalltalk (Scratch): https://scratch.mit.edu/

or Objective-C, the Objective portion of which is also derived from SmallTalk

While I understand that objective-c has clear heritage from smalltalk, this comparison always struck me as farcical. Objective-C yields very few of the benefits of a proper Smalltalk VM outside of message passing, and i suppose some of the syntax. Meanwhile the burden of having to deal with C is absolutely staggering in comparison to the benefits.

The obvious benefit of C is speed and resource utilization. This was especially true on the late 80s.

Oh, absolutely—this wasn't meant as a value judgement. I've written my fair share of objective-c for this very reason (well, that and wanting to write native GUIs ages ago). I'm just saying the parallels between it and smalltalk are highly exaggerated.