+1

Lorenzo Schiavina

-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: Pharo-dev [mailto:pharo-dev-boun...@lists.pharo.org] Per conto di kmo
Inviato: giovedì 15 maggio 2014 20:03
A: pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org
Oggetto: Re: [Pharo-dev] a Pharo talk from a ruby conference

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.
 

 



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