Sorry I wasn't clear. I didn't mean this part... "most people think Smalltalk is dead and a relic of the past and we want to avoid that negative connotation"
I meant this... "because the next thing always is 'No, don't do that, you can't change anything'. Pharo was started precisely because we want the freedom to change things where necessary (on all levels, VM, language, compiler, runtime, libraries, concepts, tools, ..)". Now to directly address you points * additional new features It is 30 years since Smalltalk-80 was released. Has there been so little advancement in non-Smalltalk fields that there is nothing to learn or improve? What about the the next 30 years? Now actually, features already differ between members of the Smalltalk family. [1] * syntax that extend Smalltalk I haven't seen much movement towards changing syntax. * desirable quality of Smalltalk /language/ is its pure simplicity. You are right. We need to take care here. But we want to avoid someone coming along saying "you can't do that! that's not Smalltalk!" For example... "Whether Squeak should comply with ANSI Smalltalk is a common flame war.[2]" * Pharo /environment/ (including the tooling and class libraries) will evolve and grow and improve, then you can't really call Pharo a "new language." Actually I don't see anyone running around saying "we've made a new language." What I've seen is that its more about the environment. But the separation between language & environment is a grey area for Smalltalk (the language is so minimal). Saying "Pharo is not Smalltalk" is a pragmatic approach to dealing with [2]. Saying it first helps avoid compliance-based arguments later if anyone is surprised that something changes. But I think its fair to consider Pharo in the Smalltalk family. You might consider similarities with "GNU's Not Unix". cheers -ben [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6368337/whats-the-difference-of-ansi-smalltalk-and-smalltalk-80 [2] http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/172 On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 10:26 AM, horrido <horrido.hobb...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think if Smalltalk has a negative connotation, you don't run away from > it, > you change it! That's what Smalltalk Renaissance is all about. > > Is changing a negative perception easier or harder than running away from > it? That is a very interesting question, and there is no obvious answer. > However, as I indicated previously, your attempt to run away from it has > completely, totally, and utterly failed. Something to think about. > > > > Ben Coman wrote > > On Thursday, January 1, 2015, Ben Coman wrote: > >> I refer to the two paragraphs following "On pharo being a new language". > >> I think Sven's response addressed these the best. > > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://forum.world.st/The-Smalltalk-Renaissance-Program-tp4797112p4797582.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at > Nabble.com. > >
