Smalltalk was good and it inspired a lot of future things but it didn't succeed because it had a bad $ price / performance ratio in the 80s and the image system created too much coupling compared to files.
It is nice in some cases, but for example, string manipulation is pretty hard to parse compared to python because frequent operations are huge sentences. Pulling out json data that is presented as NSArray's and NSDictionaries was especially painful. That large amount of text makes it slower to parse and and thus your less productive. As PG said, the consistent factor in bugs seems to be lines of code. The more verbose and boilerplat-ish a language is, the more likely your going to have slip ups that cause bugs for similar functionality.
Ex:
[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d items", itemCount] vs.
"%d items" % itemCount
or
json[@"keyA"][@"keyB"][0];
vs.
[[[json objectForKey:@"keyA"] objectForKey:@"keyB"] objectAtIndex:0];
And I work with Objective-C a lot. There is a downside to theExtremelyLong:message passingStyle:functionNames
You could say similar things about applescript too, yet I've never met anyone who actually uses it: http://alvinalexander.com/blog/post/mac-os-x/applescript-lis...
Smalltalk was good and it inspired a lot of future things but it didn't succeed because it had a bad $ price / performance ratio in the 80s and the image system created too much coupling compared to files.