As a counter-point, I did some Smalltalk development back in the 90s. It was slow, verbose, couldn't integrate with CVS, required you to use their editor, and produced a UI which was completely non-native. The development environment was a world unto itself (like Java actually), and cost a small fortune. We migrated to C++ pretty quick.
Same here, I loved the language and the concepts behind it but the companies that populated the eco-system were terrible and users did not like the end result due to the lack of native interfaces. We too went the C++ route (specifically, Borland C++ Builder, which was very fast and easy to develop with) and never looked back.
"Borland C++ Builder" I remember that. It was awful.
It drank the OO koolaid complete with multiple derivation.
For GUI I switched to the MS windows C-toolkit. Event driven and very easy to manage. The OO solutions from Borland and MS (MFC if memory serves) were very hard to use
Compared to the alternatives it was great, it compiled super fast and was very reliable. The MS windows C/C++ compiler drowned you in boilerplate, Borland just got out of the way and got you to focus on the job. I never did any deep dives into the OO solutions, for me it was just a way to get an Irix application ported over to Windows with minimal hassle.
