Hi everyone,
I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0 and had a few comments that I thought I would share.
First, there is a real opportunity for Smalltalk to come back in the guise of Pharo. Steph and Marcus are doing a great job providing leadership towards that end and the community is great. Second, we need to be careful in spreading the word. Slowly but surely (the current Pharo approach) is a great approach as it allows really building something worth spreading before trying to get everyone into it. If it spreads too quickly, bad API or immature toolkits will become ingrained and flaws will be apparent. The books, websites, etc. are really good things to get right before trying to get others into it; they are already very good. Third, if you want to really spread Smalltalk, then the fundamentals that newcomers experience need to be without obvious flaws.
Yes
From personal experience, I can tell you that BitBlt rendering makes newbies think that Pharo is a toy language. Switching to Athens rendering is therefore tremendously important for adoption. Package management really needs to be cleaned up.
yes
There needs to be a simple way to merge resources (bitmaps, audio, external files) into the codebase. Simple audio needs to work on all platforms. This may seem trivial but audio is one of the simplest things that newcomers want to do. From a Linux perspective, this will probably necessitate switching to a 64-bit VM as the 32-bit sound plug-ins are a giant pain. Given that even phone OSs are switching to 64-bit, there may not be a need for a 32-bit Pharo. Of course, much of this is already on the horizon.
As the new year begins, I'll once again be coding in Pharo and look forward to it. I'm really hopeful about the future.
Cheers,
Jeff
-- Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. http://www.je77.com/ Skype ID: jochenrick