Hey Richard, I believe the only alive cross-dialect space is the #smalltalk IRC channel in FreeNode. There's an average of 25~30 people online in that channel, which is not _too_ bad considering the size of our community. Still, compare that to, say, #lisp, with ~400 users and also being a cross-dialect channel.
Smalltalkers feel quite strong about their particular dialect. I'm not criticizing this behavior, I'm just stating facts. I also have strong feelings for "my dialects" and I don't think this is necessarily bad. However, there are some "de-facto" meeting points for all Smalltalks, like http://world.st. Even though there is no mailing list that joins all of us together, this space does feature a homogenized list of all forums ( http://forum.world.st/). Planet Smalltalk (http://planet.smalltalk.org/) is another great one for those of us who use RSS feeds. Indeed, it could take quite a while before a generic Smalltalk list was populated enough, but these two efforts show there might be an interest. Cheers, Bernat. 2015-01-22 9:11 GMT+01:00 Martin Bähr <mba...@email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at>: > Excerpts from kilon alios's message of 2015-01-22 08:13:57 +0100: > > Popularity indeed comes with a high price. Guido the creator of python he > > has said in one of his presentation that there many people who want to > add > > their libraries to python distribution but they should not want to do > that, > > because once a library is added it become very difficult to change since > so > > many people depend on it to keep backward compatibility. He claimed that > > even simple bug fixes have to go through lengthy review process. This can > > be expanded to the entirety of the IDE and the language. > > > > This the most important reason why pharo has been moving forward so fast > > and why popular languages move at glacial speed. > > I dont want to lose that so yes I dont want for pharo to become popular. > > squeak already hast that 'problem' i believe and pharo is actively working > to > counteract it by removing less important things. so i doubt pharo will > suffer > from the pressure to fill it up with new packages any time soon. > > in this case it may be a win for all because those who want backwards > compatibility can choose squeak, and those who want fast paced action may > use > pharo. > > also craig with context is working on minimizing the images which i believe > should help to move more and more things out of the core, allowing you to > pull > them back in, making it possible to choose from various versions, based on > your > compatibility needs. > > ironically, i actually expect to want backwards compatibility in the > future. > but backwards to now, not to a decade ago, so i hope pharo development will > eventually slow down somewhat. > > in addition, the multiple smalltalk implementations also act as a > stabilizing > factor, because people will want to write code that runs on all of them. > (seaside for example) so pharo can't go that far out of line and make > itself > completely incompatible. > > i am also not sure which is better. a large standard library makes for a > more stable system. > having lots of important 3rd party libraries can lead to dependency > issues... > > greetings, martin. > > -- > eKita - the online platform for your entire academic > life > -- > chief engineer > eKita.co > pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net > societyserver.org > secretary > beijinglug.org > mentor > fossasia.org > foresight developer foresightlinux.org > realss.com > unix sysadmin > Martin Bähr working in china > http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/ > > -- Bernat Romagosa.
