Comment by taylodl

I learned Smalltalk in 1994, which was well past the Elder Days. I came from a strong C++ background. I had the same experience you had in that Smalltalk showed a completely different way of doing things. Unfortunately we were hampered by garbage collection. We tried to tune and optimize as much as the environment would allow to no avail - when it came time to garbage collect the system would freeze for several seconds, sometimes up to tens of seconds. That was completely unacceptable for commercial software. Marketing also wasn't thrilled the UI came bundled with the environment. It was rather ironic that Java would come out the next year and the entire industry would pour so many resources into solving the garbage collection problem. Nowadays on a multi-processor system with concurrent garbage collection enabled the garbage collection can run faster than on manually-managed memory! That sure didn't seem like it would ever be possible in 1994!