My two cents long time in my blog on exactly the same subject: Its great to see a free version of Smalltalk at last measuring up to the needs of using it in an business sense and showing it to non-Smalltalkerâs and the âIT managersâ and not put them off. I am sure this is going to make it difficult for VA and Cincom to create new small-medium shop sales going forward especially with Seaside, Magritte and raft of other frameworks actually being born in Squeak. There obviously is the crying need for High Priority: Enusure very high reliability of the base Pharo. No bugs that are not fixable by the average developer with a bit of google and sending a few emails. If it needs that one expert in one other end.. business continuity is hugely impacted Primary: * better-faster VM aka Cog mainstream * Highly performant DBMS connectivity natively akin to JDBC through to all DBs no DB specific stuff like now, the Squeak DBX is not business friendly. * Comprehensive Web Services + XMLRPC * Pharo-Groovy bridge and / or Pharo-Ruby bridge ( or can we make Pharo work in tandem with a JVM..! this will help leverage the tons of frameworks in existence even if they are tad slower than native Java) * Configuration Management System plugin for SVN * Acceleration of easy docs and plugins/ web development related framework interfaces from Seaside viz flex/ silverlight: many that are possible as of now, but needs a Smalltalk expert to cobble it up * Have not really gone deeper with Webclient/ FTPClient/ SMTPClient et als. they need to be really simple/ highly reliable/ dumbed down for the average coder to pick snippets and make it work May be lots more.. I can bring in lot more thought this in terms of Generic/ Sectoral or Domain/ Type of Apps preferences viz: Banking/Insurance/Utilities/Technical/ Web vs GUI etc ...So first we should think hard on the segment you want to hit harder.. Secondary: * Better tools for GUI Dev and more standard GUI development capabilities * Make Pharo easily usable for a team of 100+ developers together in one/multiple locations with code synch issues, change / version control , performance ( a host of other stuff included) taken care of. * Pluggable to industry standard tools for development: Rational/ Together Soft viz for UML creation and conversion to code / reverse engineer code to UML Follow through with: * Pluggable with QTP/ Testing Automation tools.. Actually this is very important in the standard large volume development. Makes a huge difference for the risk mitigation for the company. really inexpensive , kind of not so highly technical staff runs this show in comparison to Unit Tests/ test automation through ST code is a more riskier investment and I have not seen in JAva/ .Net / or even Smalltalk large legacy projects unit test done and maintained well enough -Skrish