points by musicale 3 days ago | 0 comments
I don't understand why Pharo doesn't proudly acknowledge that it is a version of Smalltalk on its landing page, rather than this lukewarm statement on its About page:
> A dynamic, pure, reflective object-oriented programming language in the tradition of Smalltalk
Why not call it a modern Smalltalk, which seems to be what it is?
Smalltalk is a great language and its ecosystem deserves to grow.
[–] d-us-vb 2 days ago
[–] musicale 1 day ago
> Pharo is its own system, heavily inspired by Smalltalk to the extent that non-language lawyers look at it and say "it's Smalltalk".
That is a pretty good argument for calling it "Pharo Smalltalk" or something, which would be accurate and descriptive.
[–] xkriva11 1 day ago
Alan Kay: A couple of years ago, we started this project called Squeak, which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk, and when you fool around Squeak, please, please, think of it from that standpoint.
If you say "Pharo is a Smalltalk" then you might get some of the religious elite come and claim "Thou must change this aspect of the system! For it is in violation of the law of Smalltalk as handed down to our forefathers in Smalltalk 80". Pharo is its own system, heavily inspired by Smalltalk to the extent that non-language lawyers look at it and say "it's Smalltalk".
People argue about whether Janet or Clojure are lisps. Some people say that only Common Lisp is Lisp. Some include Scheme as well. But the unqualified "Lisp" usually means Common Lisp when referring to an actual language with an actual specification that you can find an actual compiler to create binaries with. Pharo is a Smalltalk in a similar way to how Scheme is a Lisp. Different enough that saying "Scheme" means something different from "Lisp" to everyone who knows enough to know what you're talking about.