Speaking as someone who had experience programming in Smalltalk in its heyday, it had at least as many downsides as upsides and those who claim it was a peak ar

Speaking as someone who had experience programming in Smalltalk in its heyday, it had at least as many downsides as upsides and those who claim it was a peak are either looking at it through rose-tinted nostalgia or are Alan Kay. One favorite advantage was that as much as possible of the system was written in itself and the development environment was an integral component. Any developer could see and change anything. The approach was that you took the Smalltalk system and built your application as an extension onto it. "Playground-VM" is a pretty good description. Unwieldy? Not if you bought into it entirely, in roughly the same way that certain people I know bought into Emacs: Use it as your login shell and do everything through it. It was bad for creating stand-alone programs or scripts; instead, you add objects and methods to do whatever you wanted to do today.