Looking at the new pharo website (it’s great, by the way), I found I was more upset than I thought I would be by the total absence of the s-word.
Perhaps lots of people think smalltalk is a dead language but that’s not the only view of smalltalk that people have out there. I came to pharo looking for a new, better way of developing applications. I knew from reading about the history of computing that smalltalk was the purest object oriented language. I knew that it had pioneered many advanced ideas in program development. I knew that it was so far ahead of its time that other languages were still hobbling along behind it trying to catch up. I knew that java and C# were constantly trying to be more smalltalk-like. So I looked for a smalltalk – ideally an open source smalltalk that I could use on Linux. And so I came to pharo. If someone had told me that pharo was not smalltalk, I would not have been interested, I would have though pharo was just a niche product (like Rebol, say) - something that might simply fade away with no history behind it. And I’m sure there are other people like me out there who also have heard of the smalltalk mystique. This heritage is something to be proud of. So why hide what pharo is? It’s not smalltalk’s reputation as /dead/ that I think is likely to put people off. It’s more smalltalks’s reputation as an academic’s language, used to investigate abstruse computer science problems, but unsuitable for mundane day-to-day development. The sort of language that cannot produce a stand-alone executable (a myth - but pharo could do with a deployment wizard of some kind). The sort of language that can produce incredible data visualisations (Roassal) but is unable to put up a decent data entry screen (Spec). (Sorry, that's unfair but I could not resist it! ) Rather than hide the smalltalk origins of pharo, I think they should be shouted from the rooftops. I would add something like this to the web page. */Pharo is an alive-and-kicking, developer-focused, version of smalltalk – the most beautiful idea in the history of computing./* Just my two cents. By the way, I really don't like the idea of using /agile /as a description of pharo. Agile means almost nothing now - it's just a management buzzword for nothing in particular. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/a-Pharo-talk-from-a-ruby-conference-tp4756805p4759204.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
