On Sat, Mar 5, 2016 at 10:05 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
On 05 Mar 2016, at 19:57, Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 2:10 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
On 05 Mar 2016, at 18:22, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote:
Stef,
On Mar 5, 2016, at 12:10 AM, stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:
You probably leave in a protected environment but I do not live in the same. Did you check numPy recently or R? momemtum? Do you think that people do not know how to count? In 1980 my students were not even born, so how can it be better than python, java, c#, lua, ...
Do you think that it makes me happy to see my old friends leaving our language and do node.js. Seriously. Why do you blame me? Frankly tell to leave Pharo and I will leave. I can tell you. I think that I need a break in my life in this moment so it would be a good opportunity. Because if each time I do something to improve the wealth and visibility of our system I get such kind of feedback then may be this is the time to do something. Afterall I may be wrong. Seriously if you think that I'm not doing a good job and you want to stay with old friends just let me know. but if I stay then do not tell me that I'm an asshole that does not want to promote smalltalk.
I do not blame you. I am offended by Pharo disavowing the Smalltalk name. I am offended when people state Pharo is not Smalltalk. I want to refute false assumptions about the name Smalltalk, such as the equating it with cobol. Instead of taking it personally why don't you address my points about older programming languages whose names (AFAICT) are not perceived negatively?
I support this community and am excited to participate in it. I admire and respect your efforts, Stéphane, in developing, organizing and supporting this community. But that does not mean I will keep quiet about something I profoundly disagree with and think is wrong. And that thing is to deny Pharo is Smalltalk.
And I do this not because I am a zealot, but because words meaning are important, because to understand each other we should call a spade a spade, and because I am grateful for and delighted by this thing called Smalltalk, and I will not support taking credit away from it. Ruby is inspired by Smalltalk. Pharo is the real thing.
Pharo was started because a certain situation existed in the Squeak community that blocked progress for a group of people that had another vision. Pharo was started and exists to fulfil that grand vision, a vision that is clearly rooted in Smalltalk history, but goes beyond that.
If you want to focus on words, your sentence 'Pharo is Smalltalk' is not so innocent or politically free, as you know very well, even if it looks like factually correct (it is BTW).
We say it differently because of what I just wrote, because we want to be free of backwards compatibility (if necessary), because we want to have a larger future than maintaining something old (even though we absolutely respect and acknowledge it). Yes, it is a bit of a play of words, but not without reason.
Here is one writeup that tries to describe the same idea:
http://www.tudorgirba.com/blog/pharo-is-pharo
But the best documents are the Pharo vision documents.
The counter argument is that there was Smalltalk-71, -72, -76, -78, -80. Some of these were distinctly different from the last. So Smalltalk was an *evolving* system. Why can't it be so again!? and be Smalltalk-Renew, Smalltalk-Next, Smalltalk-Evolved, Smalltalk-16, Smalltalk-P16 or Smalltalk-P5 "Pharo 5".
As long as the emphasis is on Pharo being an *evolution* of Smalltalk (which is not in doubt), I think we cover all bases - stimulating the interest of newcomers and/or detractors of old, as well as Smalltalk stalwarts without being constrained by the past. As much as we might want to promote Pharo being separate from Smalltalk (which I believe was a reasonable strategy to establish identity at the time of the fork from Squeak), Smalltalk is always going to be there for anyone who scratches beneath the surface and they end up thinking "Oh its *just* Smalltalk" anyway. So this remains the "elephant in the room", *subtly* undermining of our marketing. Its the sort of weakness that can be better to hit head on as "Smalltalk-Evolved" (since "Evolved" is a term with positive connotations in the gaming / sci-fi communities.)
cheers -ben
Really, Ben, are you suggesting we stop calling it Pharo ?
Come on, let's be serious.
(BTW, this thread started with a discussion about the naming of an external library, which is entirely up to the main developers driving that library, not us).
Yes you are right, sorry for the noise. Let's move this thread outside pharo-dev. -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/