There is also just the simple issue of how many people are working on these systems. Right now there is an Opensmalltalk VM change in the words -- SISTA -- that

There is also just the simple issue of how many people are working on these systems. Right now there is an Opensmalltalk VM change in the words -- SISTA -- that has the potential for a 3x speedup of those systems. But it's largely the work of one or two people and it's unfunded. They are working on it in their limited free time. Additionally, there is a specific kind of dominant "computing culture" that we live in. Show a new language to mainstream developers and they will want to know how to do a "hello world" and which text editor / command line program to run in order to use it, as if these are the only ways to interact with a machine in any meaningful way. Anything outside of this seems like it's "not real programming".