Especially in the 70s and 80s, that was a huge performance barrier.
Contrast this with C, which probably won because of its largest benefactor, Bell Labs and UNIX. Smalltalk in some sense was a competitor with UNIX itself.
Smalltalk's influence is everywhere, but the sad thing about it is that it's dev tools were so much ahead of time of anything else.
It is a shame that Self and F-Script didn't gain a bit of attention.
F-Script was really awesome, even more with F-Script Anywhere
StrongTalk was also very influential, because many of its developers also ended up working on core parts of the JVM and V8 JITs both at Sun and Google.
As a Python coder, I played with Pharo and tried several tutorials and read a book on Smalltalk-80. I get the gist of things, but have trouble actually writing the code as things aren't obvious and there is no StackOverflow or cookbook for common tasks. It took me forever to figure out how to do file IO and that sort of thing. The other problem is that deployment isn't just running a script, but deploying the image and runtime of some obscure language nobody has ever heard of in enterprise software and no IT department is going to be cool with it.
i actually meant pharo above, i never used genuine smalltalk, just what the pharo mooc gave us
https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/successes/financial-ser...
Of course, mission critical business software still needs to be deployed long after fashions change.