A Medium publication on Smalltalk and Pharo, arguing for the language's productivity, its design, and its relevance to modern development.
HN commenters link it to support claims that Smalltalk is highly productive, to explain Lisp and Smalltalk symmetry, and as an intro to Amber.
"why smalltalk failed" may afaicr have been first thing I tried: https://www.google.com/search?q="Why+Smalltalk+failed" . https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk-failed-to-dominate-the-world-93e7e4195039 isn't the article I was looking for. It's much more recent, and much less in-depth. However http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsSmalltalkDead covers a lot of the same ground, unsurprisingly.
I'm pretty sure that late-'80s/early-'90s ST was largely run on commodity (or fairly-commodity) hardware: PCs, Macs, Unix workstations. It was commercial Lisp that tended to be tied to dedicated hardware. IIUC Smalltalk did have a then-expensive appetite for RAM though.
The commercial STs of the time weren't good as CGI languages like Perl and PHP for the same reasons they weren't suitable as Perl-style scripting languages in general. Meanwhile, behind the hype it soon turned out that Java applets were not ready for prime time either, while servlets were something that could probably have easily been replicated in ST (and for all I know, likely were).
You might try the keyword "expressiveness" and see how well that maps to what you are talking about.
Definitely see Paul Graham's essay "Beating the Averages"
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
People have tried to define and measure this and related ideas in different ways, and I'm not sold on any of them in particular. I can however suggest some languages that stand out in some of these explorations that you might consider.
+ Lisp dialects. In particular, take a look at Clojure, Shen, and Racket.
+ Smalltalk. Try Pharo. Check out some YouTube videos with Alan Kay.
This is also worth a read
https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/lisp-smalltalk-and-the-power-of-symmetry-8bd96aaa0c0c
If you're interested in math and data science stuff, also check out Julia.
Being shackled to existing file-based tools holds you back from improving the software development process. In the past several decades, we've seen incremental improvements but nothing really earth-shattering. Do you really believe we'll still be using file-based tools for software development 50 or 100 years from now? Smalltalk is the future of software development created 45 years in the past. See https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/smalltalk-and-the-future-of-the-software-industry-3f69cac13e5a.
Check out this lightweight intro, which touches on REST API communication: https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/a-gentle-introduction-to-amber-8c532631e9ab
It also shows how to integrate with external JavaScript libraries. The example they use is D3.
Here's part 2 of their article: https://medium.com/@richardeng/you-are-now-an-ambersmith-c257a73f4ef9
There are probably other tutorial that are more extensive.
The link it gives for the proof that smalltalk is productive contains the most fake cooked statistics I have ever seen:
https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/smalltalk-s-proven-productivity-fe7cbd99c061
That is not data, it is something someone cooked up, not even based on a real project.
Smalltalk’s Proven Productivity
https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/smalltalk-s-proven-productivity-fe7cbd99c061
http://www.ifpug.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IYSM.-Thirty-years-of-IFPUG.-Software-Economics-and-Function-Point-Metrics-Capers-Jones.pdf