For one thing, Self was barely fast enough to work with on reasonable hardware of the day. If you don't mind 100ms+ latency on every click and keypress, it's f

For one thing, Self was barely fast enough to work with on reasonable hardware of the day. If you don't mind 100ms+ latency on every click and keypress, it's fine. I found it frustratingly slow, so I guess I'm pretty latency sensitive. Perhaps it's zippier now on today's fancy hardware. Smalltalk (e.g. VisualWorks) felt much faster even though it was rendering components itself. Probably a mixture of optimization of common cases that was missing in Self and certain advanced compilation/interpretation tricks that were also missing. VisualAge felt slower. If you used VisualAge for Java you also were using the Smalltalk UI. (That is, until Micro Edition). Squeak using Morphic was pretty slow in its original non-jit mode but the Smalltalk-80 UI was fast (and quite different from how you expect things to work.)