Smalltalk was ahead of its time. So much so that its VM was unbearably slow. Thirsting for CPU power that just wasn't there. I recall using a Pentium-based mach

Smalltalk was ahead of its time. So much so that its VM was unbearably slow. Thirsting for CPU power that just wasn't there. I recall using a Pentium-based machine and waiting up to five seconds to open a context menu, and the IDE (VisualWorks?) could not keep pace with my typing. I could type in a message name and watch the letters appear one-at-a-time. Compared with Borland's TurboPascal and similar IDEs of the day, Smalltalk was a slog, albeit a powerful one. There are other issues with Smalltalk that we know now that we didn't then. Such as broad and deep class hierarchies are hard to use. Smalltalk didn't enforce type-safety when I used it (i.e., you can have runtime faults because you can send any message to any class and if you didn't implement "does not understand", you won't know until exercising that branch).