Seeking some of that old-time Smalltalk religion

I know there are some Smalltalk folks who hang out here, so I’d like to
pose
perhaps a fairly ignorant question:

How far away is irb from a Smalltalk development environment?

Put another way, what must need to be done to get to a Smalltalk
development
environment? Will being able to load / save image files get me closer
(have
folks done this by serializing the ObjectSpace tree to disk already)? Or
am
I just going to have to experience it for myself to get the gestalt of
Smalltalk IDEs?

Thanks for any & all insight …
-John