COMPUTING : Ruby, SmallTalk and Patterns

There is a really interesting interview at ACM with Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk. He bemoans the lack of _real_ advances in computing since the late seventies - he hoped that Smalltalk would be superceded in around 1984, but so far nothing has turned up. (Personally I think GUIs advanced quite a bit up to System 7 of the Mac, and everything has gone backwards since then)
Also, have written a simple 'site traverser' in Ruby, just to check it out really. Quite easy, though I don't understand why methods can't access 'global' variables. I don't think I've done it very Ruby, but I did do a quick little refactor after Tam pointed out I was missing some stuff, and took advantage of the lack of Typing to make those changes more easily than in a Java program.
And it was only 190 lines long, rather than an entire project in Java.
Finally, there is a new pattern repository set up by M$. I haven't checked it out yet, but I love patterns :) so I hope it is useful. (BTW, all those people who are 'sick of patterns', get over it. They are a very useful tool for coming up to speed when thinking about meta problems, ie when not worrying where that missing semicolon is (which you don't have to worry about with Ruby:) )