> This seems like one of those spots where Smalltalk is a victim of cultural changes that happened around it...25 years ago, a tight integration between the language and the IDE like that would have sounded great to me.

Smalltalk has always went in the amazing language to look for inspiration from. Commercial implementations were pretty pricey (I think in the thousands). Ultimately, smalltalk really fell out of favor because:

* Bad story on concurrency and multiprocessing.

* Wasn't really all that portable.

* Tightly bound with development environment.

* Resource hungry mostly due to being tightly bound to the ide, and many implementations required the IDE to ship with the product.

* Expensive

I learned a lot about object oriented development from playing with smalltalk, and was able to employ a lot of what I learned using Java, Python, C#, Objective C, and C++. To this day, you really see a lot of code editing and management concepts that started in smalltalk in your favorite IDE.