[Newbies] Using Squeak to teach undergrads OOP

[lanas]

Le Jeudi, 14 Janvier 2010 19:57:53 -0500,
waufrepi III <waufrepi at gmail.com> a écrit :

> "I had lunch with several of the other CS faculty yesterday and I
> brought up your enthusiasm for smalltalk, which I've never used. Some
> of the faculty panned it because they claimed the I/O features were
> either poor or nonexistent. "

I do not know much Squeak at the moment, but I do know computer systems
and other programming languages. If they ask for Input/Output
performance it must be because this is a embedded course where such
things matters ?  Or maybe they are running very, very slow computers
in their classes on which traditional developing is slow (eg.
compiling takes forever for the example code) ? 

I remember being curious once in the past about Smalltalk.  So I ended
up with about 30 5 1/4" floppy disks that I would load one after the
other in a 8MHz 8086 with some 640 KB RAM... To end up seeing after
maybe 15 minutes the beginning of a user interface.  That surely is not
the case today with Squeak on any modern PC.

In short, what do they mean with I/O ?

Al