Scott A Crosby writes: <snip>
Smalltalk is not necessarily inherently slow. How many millions of man hours have been spent on C compilers? Many of the smartest people in the world have been working for decades on C and static-language compilation. Contrast this to Smalltalk.
I'll bet you that if you got together a couple of profs here and about a half-dozen grad students on the project, you'd have a dynamic compiler/interpreter combo that'd be fully dynamic, yet come very close to C++, *perhaps* even exceed it. (Dynamic recompilation is very very cool.)
Smart people can do amazing things; the trick is attracting them to squeak/smalltalk.
People are amazed when they watch me use my old PPC macos box or even order 68k macos box with Macintosh Common Lisp.
Oh, they say, it's interpreted. Um, no, I respond, compiled. When do you compile it? When I type, there is no choice. No, that can't be true.
one defun and disassemble later and their view of the world changes :-)