Personally I haven't read any real animosity from Levente toward Pharo
in this thread.
His issue was not the choice of Pharo but rather the incorrect
information stated as a basis of the decision. Pharo has enough good
things to represent itself without basing decisions on false data. I
happen to agree with Levente about the correctness of those statements.
But those were the understandings of the poster which did so without any
expressed ill intent toward Squeak. People make mistakes.
And to be clear as to my understanding
a) removing unessential code from Squeak (Squeak, having started as a
children’s education project, has accumulated a fair amount of cruft
over the years),
Squeak did not start as a children's education project.
To quote the Squeak history page
"""
The goal was to build a system using a language as expressive and
immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals such as
prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and
another run at the Dynabook concept.
"""
One goal out of the three expressed was for education software, which
can entail much more than children's education.
The other two goals had nothing to do with education.
b) clearer licensing (MIT license),
Not an issue at all at the time of the post. And it is not clear that it
was a real issue at the time of his decision for Pharo. In my opinion
the Squeak license wasn't much of an issue for most people unless you
had to answer to some corporate types. And even before Squeak became
primarily MIT, it had been released under the Apache license, which a
portion still remains. Squeak just happened to pursue a more challenging
vetting of the source code prior to re-licensing.
c) more frequent updates (think Ubuntu versus Debian), and
I can see how this could be an opinion. And I see how some would
disagree with it.
d) being a reference implementation for the Seaside platform (perfect,
exactly what I need it for).
Yes, the current maintainers develop on Pharo and explicitly do not
support anything else. And yes, there was a brief time that Squeak was
not easily usable for Seaside. But that is no longer the case. Nor is
the fact that the current maintainers using Pharo for development mean
that the other ports of Seaside are any less Seaside, or less current,
or less maintained. Nor does the blogger expressly state that either.
Now on his blog he has edited the page to denote comments from this
thread. He comments that he got these opinions from the Pharo Wikipedia
entry. From that source I can see how he came to some of these conclusions.
I am pro Pharo, it is what I am using to develop my business
application. I am not anti Squeak.
The good energy in this community needs to be based on honest truths
about the benefits of Pharo. Those benefits have absolutely nothing to
do with any deficiencies in Squeak. Lets keep this a pro Pharo energy,
not an anti Squeak energy. A person can choose either and have made an
excellent decision.
There are technical differences between Squeak and Pharo. There are also
vision and community differences. Plenty of real reasons to choose
between them.
For me, my vision and goals, Pharo is a more comfortable fit. Its a
personal decision.
So please, don't make me persona non grata for this post. :)
And lets give Levente a break. I don't see any evil in his post. There
is no wrong in seeking accurate statements. Pharo would want such from
the Squeak side of things.
And on to good positive energy and the fruits thereof.
Jimmie
