On 15 May 2014, at 20:18, David Astels <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree whole heartedly. Ditch “agile” a tool/language can’t be agile > anyway… agile is a characteristic of a team, their process, and their > dynamic. And it’s generally meaningless now. > > Also, Pharo IS a Smalltalk. That’s the biggest thing that makes it > interesting. Saying Pharo isn’t Smalltalk is like saying Clojure isn’t Lisp. > In Clojure’s case, it’s further from classic Lisp than Pharo is from > Smalltalk-80. > > Dave
Copied today from http://clojure.org : << Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR, and JavaScript). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs. I hope you find Clojure's combination of facilities elegant, powerful, practical and fun to use. >> Lisp is _not_ mentioned in the first paragraph, and only once (ok twice, but in the same sentence) in the second. This is all about marketing, not about denying something. Yes, the goal is not to scare people away or to start with potentially limiting or worse negative connotations. > On May 15, 2014, at 1:02 PM, kmo <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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. >> > >
