The question is moot -- Smalltalk isn't so good. Back in the 90s we were developing sales force automation software in VB3 (ugh!) which was by no means wonderf

The question is moot -- Smalltalk isn't so good. Back in the 90s we were developing sales force automation software in VB3 (ugh!) which was by no means wonderful. Our stuff ran far faster on modest hardware than similar Smalltalk software running on (by the standards of the time) ludicrously powerful hardware. Delphi, when it came out, was far, far better still. Smalltalk also seems to have accumulated annoying cruft faster than it got useful. Another large Smalltalk project I was involved in (as a UI designer) suffered from multiple incompatible class hierarchies. I wanted to make different controls that did similar things look similar, but it was impossible because some controls inherited from a 1-bit graphical library and couldn't be rendered in color, others from a 4-bit graphical library and couldn't be rendered in 256 colors, and others didn't respond to certain events in certain ways (e.g. action on mousedown instead of mouseup). It was an absolute nightmare. The language may be fine, but the implementations of it were slow and bloated, and the class libraries were a disaster area. (Of course, the main company pushing Smalltalk at the time was IBM, which probably says something.)