I've been told by Smalltalk programmers that everything in that eco system used to be insanely expensive. There was a period of time when this was true, which

I've been told by Smalltalk programmers that everything in that eco system used to be insanely expensive. There was a period of time when this was true, which helped to kill Smalltalk mindshare. Then, there was a period of time when there were many economically priced Smalltalk environments, and a even a good FOSS one. Now, we have a couple of good FOSS environments.