Sort of. I have a bad habit of forgetting Smalltalk in these kinds of conversations, but that is possibly because Smalltalk images exist in their own happy little worlds. I love working in Smalltalk environments, it is always a mind blowing experience, the system is completely homogeneous, accessible, introspectable, modifiable, etc. -- until you hit the hard boundary between the image and the host system, be it hardware or software. That boundary leaves quite a gap that smalltalks tend to be unable to fill by themselves (mostly due to a relative lack of resources). I can imagine a smalltalk system that could go all the way down to modern assembly, but unfortunately no such system exists today (that I'm aware of). If you can live inside the image then yes, Smalltalk is possibly even better.