Here's my musings about how we integrate the two motives - to acknowledge our heritage /and/ break out of our pigeon hole. My key point here is to gradually introduce the Smalltalk part after people are deep enough to have gotten excited about the ideas without dismissing them because of cultural baggage... Drilling down: 1. Sound bite: "Pharo - The immersive programming experience" 2. Why Pharo: (about a paragraph, like the one on the site now, "Pharo gives you immediate and total control over your programming experience..." 3. What is it. Here we can accurately paint the nuanced picture, distinguishing Smalltalk as an idea based on design principles vs. Smalltalk-80. If "Smalltalk" more exactly means an environment + libraries + a language (I think that order is important - the syntax was always the least interesting thing about Smalltalk). What we might really say if we had the time to go beyond an initial sound bite is: Pharo is: - a [pick 2 or 3 of: dynamic, open, immersive, live] environment (like an IDE and OS rolled into one) - beautifully designed core libraries including a web client/server, FFI, Y, Z... - a dialect of the Smalltalk programming language For #1, the inspiration is most accurately the Dynabook For #2, IMHO enough components have been rewritten to stand on it's own For #3, this is where we are most obviously a Smalltalk, and should be clear about it And in an FAQ answer any common objections people might have: Q: Is Pharo Smalltalk? A: When most people hear "Smalltalk", they think of Smalltalk-80, which Pharo is not. However, Smalltalk is really an idea... the lineage of which Pharo is a proud member Q: Can I talk to the world outside the environment? A: Yes! While the original Smalltalk was quite insulated, now you can [interact on the command line](link to unix command line examples e.g. the very Ruby-like pharo [image filename] -e "self inform: 'hello world'"), [talk to C libraries](link to native boost), etc. yada yada yada ----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-is-Smalltalk-and-Not-tp4757342p4757348.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.