I was very enthusiastic about Smalltalk in the late 80's when I got Digitalk's System V to play with. And one thing torpedoed its use for me - local variables i

I was very enthusiastic about Smalltalk in the late 80's when I got Digitalk's System V to play with. And one thing torpedoed its use for me - local variables in code blocks are local to the code object, not the execution stack, so you cannot use them for instance data in multiple instances of persistent State Machines. I thought this was a bug, but Digitalk told me no, it's in the language specification. Since that is my preferred way of achieving hard Real Time event driven concurrency, I could no longer use it and switched to hand-rolled OOP in C. Why not C++? you might ask. The year was 1988. I needed to run on Macs as well as PCs. The only company advertising C++ for Mac at the time was AT&T (the purely Preprocessor implementation). When I called them to order a copy they said "Really? C++ for Mac? You're only the sixth person ever to ask for it, so we have not done it yet". At the same time, Objective C was similarly not available in Windows.