Here's my musings about how we integrate the two motives - to acknowledge our
heritage /and/ break out of our pigeon hole. My key point here is to
gradually introduce the Smalltalk part after people are deep enough to have
gotten excited about the ideas without dismissing them because of cultural
baggage...
Drilling down:
1. Sound bite: "Pharo - The immersive programming experience"
2. Why Pharo: (about a paragraph, like the one on the site now, "Pharo gives
you immediate and total control over your programming experience..."
3. What is it. Here we can accurately paint the nuanced picture,
distinguishing Smalltalk as an idea based on design principles vs.
Smalltalk-80. If "Smalltalk" more exactly means an environment + libraries +
a language (I think that order is important - the syntax was always the
least interesting thing about Smalltalk). What we might really say if we had
the time to go beyond an initial sound bite is:
Pharo is:
- a [pick 2 or 3 of: dynamic, open, immersive, live] environment (like
an
IDE and OS rolled into one)
- beautifully designed core libraries including a web client/server,
FFI,
Y, Z...
- a dialect of the Smalltalk programming language
For #1, the inspiration is most accurately the Dynabook
For #2, IMHO enough components have been rewritten to stand on it's own
For #3, this is where we are most obviously a Smalltalk, and should be clear
about it
And in an FAQ answer any common objections people might have:
Q: Is Pharo Smalltalk?
A: When most people hear "Smalltalk", they think of Smalltalk-80, which
Pharo is not. However, Smalltalk is really an idea... the lineage of which
Pharo is a proud member
Q: Can I talk to the world outside the environment?
A: Yes! While the original Smalltalk was quite insulated, now you can
[interact on the command line](link to unix command line examples e.g. the
very Ruby-like pharo [image filename] -e "self inform: 'hello world'"),
[talk to C libraries](link to native boost), etc.
yada yada yada
-----
Cheers,
Sean
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