Further down some asked "is anything from the Smalltalk OO model that hadn't made its way into Ruby?" Well I don't know about OO model, but to extend my example above, at step 5 when the debugger appears, <Save & Quit> the image. Then copy the folder to another PC, open up the Pharo image, and continue with steps 6. and 7.
In days past with the predominance of the desktop, 'perhaps' the 'live image' concept central to Smalltalk had some logistic issues (for some) but I think in this day of applications running on remote web based systems, being able to store/download/restart the execution context that caused an exception is a great advantage.
The other interesting this is that VNC can connect directly into the image, so you can be directly using the GUI IDE Smalltalk tools on a remote server.
In days past with the predominance of the desktop, 'perhaps' the 'live image' concept central to Smalltalk had some logistic issues (for some) but I think in this day of applications running on remote web based systems, being able to store/download/restart the execution context that caused an exception is a great advantage.
Now if you don't want to download the size of whole image, you can download the debugging context only, and continue. See http://marianopeck.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/moving-contexts-....
The other interesting this is that VNC can connect directly into the image, so you can be directly using the GUI IDE Smalltalk tools on a remote server.