Ruby and Objective-C both have a strong Smalltalk lineage. You typically use the C part of Objective-C to perform basic operations like arithmetic and function calling -- if you know C already, it may be a more comfortable starting point, but it doesn't show off the power you get when every value is an object (and you can do things like add new numeric types while the system is running: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...).