Hello everyone, 1. Whichever fork is most professional will win. I believe this was one of the goals of the Pharo project, so I'd have to say Pharo will eventually lead.
2. Smalltalk in all its forms will fail unless it can grab developer interest from outside the current community. Pharo may be better than Squeak, but if everyone moves from Squeak to Pharo, your audience is still too small to be significant. I'm a web-application developer (Django, GAE) and self-taught Python coder. I learned Python because it was easy, and there is a wealth of information available on the internet. If I have any problem in Python, I simply type 'python issue' into Google and within a few clicks I'm usually looking at the answer. When I tried to learn Smalltalk, it was intensely frustrating. There were no on-line resources, no tutorials, no explanations. I think the real question is, "Is Smalltalk a better language than Python?" By better, I mean, "Can I get done more coding tasks faster, in a more sustainable way?" Right now, the answer to this question is a resounding 'No'. But that answer might change with a slick Smalltalk package, and an abundance of developer resources. As it is, Smalltalk is a language for eccentrics. But it doesn't need to be that way. All of this to say that I really like the beautiful simplicity of Smalltalk's main paradigm - Message Passing. It's simple. It's elegant. But learning it is a stone bitch, and once you've learned it, it has only limited value (compared, for example, to the wealth of things one can do in Python). I wish this would change. -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Squeak-Forks-Popularity---Trends-Estimate-tp3211130p3232572.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
