[stcredzero]

One of the major factors in speed is efficient memory layout.

In most applications, I would gladly give up some compute speed to gain some programming productivity.

By Smalltalk standards, Python is pretty profligate. (By 90's C programmer standards, Smalltalk is pretty profligate.) However, Smalltalk still has many of the high productivity features as Python. (In fact, the debugging story is far superior.) I suspect, though, that Python is still a far superior environment for the things you use it for.

[xapata]

I enjoyed coding homework assignments in Smalltalk, but for some reason I never tried using it professionally.