“Invent the future” a resonating statement that we can only be inspired by. There are thousands of more ideas, works that continually inspires us all. Inspiration drives the creation of something new. Pharo Smalltalk begins with something that existed, but is a new avatar and will probably head to be the best dialect of Smalltalk.
Pharo Smalltalk has begun to establish roots in the minds of so many more engineers/ developers and become more relevant for its use in enterprise application space. The inspiration for its changes from the base of Smalltalk emanate and will continue to be influenced from various sources. Smalltalk is not defined rigorously to be the one published and controlled by one corporation but by the tenets that have held sway and inspired a Java, Ruby and others in their development.
* Image based environment
* IDE, inspectors, debuggers and many other tools as part of its development environment
* Dynamic typed, garbage controlled
* Primarily single inheritance structure
* VM that is rooted in the Blue book, but evolved over time and will continue to evolve even further
* Meta programming capabilities
Many other features add unto the perception of Smalltalk in our mind, not the differences in:
* Morphic UI vs MVC UI or any others
* Platform independent or only single OS focussed ( viz: Dolphin / Smalltalk MT et als.. )
* Ideas and concepts viz: spoon, traits, scratch et als
* Git / SVN filtree rather than MC backed SCM
…… or any other minor changes…
Each dialect will spawn a host of new ideas and will enrich the Smalltalk community. Pharo Smalltalk does currently give a great thrust in that direction and it will be for the greater good to continue to do so say for next few years more before there is a feel that it has diverged far out of its Smalltalk origins to be labelled anything but Smalltalk in its heart and soul, wrapped as it may be that differently
The end goal should not drive an image campaign, the product should be built and shaped to be perfect and the ultimate tool for its use. People as they adopt will shape its image and perception to their benefit and its growth.
Like Steve Jobs, focus in doing the best with the platform, contributing the best to the platform in whatever way it enables enterprise to adopt and use it forever with guarantees of:
* VM being absolutely rock stable, perfect in its execution of all operations
* Growing body of tools, capabilities, libraries et als
* Interoperability with what exists in simple and fail safe manner.
* Newer exciting projects that it spawns inspires others to try their works on it..
Much more that is already been done over the past 4 years and is expected ahead…
Relabelling Pharo Smalltalk to anything but as a dialect of Smalltalk, I believe is nothing short of denying its own origins for now. Let it mature and diverge enough to be relabelled.
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Inspired by a blog from a much admirable Smalltalker:
http://www.tudorgirba.com/blog/pharo-is-pharo
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