Smalltalk was not available to most programmers back then, it needed an expensive machine with a lot of memory
I was programming back then. It ran just fine on fairly standard commodity hardware from the time 486 stopped being "high end." Also, at one point the entire American Airlines reservations system was written in Smalltalk and running on 3 early 90's Power Mac workstations.
the implementations were very expensive.
More or less true. At one point there were $5k and $10k per-seat licenses.
Apps were also much smaller, so the disadvantages of C were less pressing.
There was a major DoD project that let defense analysts do down-to-the soldier simulations of entire strategic theaters. (So imagine this as an ultra-detailed, ultra realstic RTS.) They did this as a competition with 3 teams, one working in C++, one in another language I can't recall, and one in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk group was so far ahead of the other two, there was simply no question. That was a complex app. There were countless complex financial and logistics apps.
I was programming back then. It ran just fine on fairly standard commodity hardware from the time 486 stopped being "high end." Also, at one point the entire American Airlines reservations system was written in Smalltalk and running on 3 early 90's Power Mac workstations.
the implementations were very expensive.
More or less true. At one point there were $5k and $10k per-seat licenses.
Apps were also much smaller, so the disadvantages of C were less pressing.
There was a major DoD project that let defense analysts do down-to-the soldier simulations of entire strategic theaters. (So imagine this as an ultra-detailed, ultra realstic RTS.) They did this as a competition with 3 teams, one working in C++, one in another language I can't recall, and one in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk group was so far ahead of the other two, there was simply no question. That was a complex app. There were countless complex financial and logistics apps.
So, small apps? Not so much.