Dear Squeakers I want to send you a message because I estimate Squeakers and I want to open the door to see how new relationship can be build. So consider that as an open hand - even if my english may let you think otherwise. First, Pharo is not against Squeak. We forked because we believed that we could not make Squeak move in any coherent direction. We are sure that you understand our reasons. Just think a moment about the amount of time and energy we invested in Squeak in the past (I wrote more than anybody else books on squeak, build tutorials, lecture support, videos....- with esug over the years we spent more than 30 kEuros in Squeak related actions) so deciding to go for Pharo was not an easy choice but a necessary one: At one point I was thinking to quit Smalltalk and go to see Ruby and Python for real. Pharo is the only way that I get back my fun in Smalltalk. So what are my dreams? For Pharo ====== We want a clean, lean and fast Smalltalk. An implementation that makes other dynamic language jealous. We want a place where we/you can innovate. We want people to be able to invent THEIR future. We want a place where people can make money with it and build robust applications. Being able to experiment fast is important but for that the system should be clean, robust and flexible. Having a platform for experimentation requires that the platform is not experimental. About innovation I mean in no order: Support for multitouch screen, bootstrappable Smalltalk, immutability bit and its impact, ephemerons, new module system?, first class instance variables, using traits for real (like in ruby where any class can be a model without inheriting from model), VAT-like system?, event system like in AmbiantTalk?, I put ? because some of these should be implemented assessed tested... and understood deeply. About clean Clean network, clean event system, clean object kernel, better compiler (open - we got first class instance variable with no runtime penalties in one afternoon). Clean class builder... Now enough about Pharo. http://www.pharo-project.org/ About Etoys ======== I love Etoys (we translated the book and did more presentations of etoys than most squeakers) but I do not like its implementation. Why? Because it is bad. Any body that looks at it knows it. When I removed Etoys part from Pharo I'm sad but there is no other choices. Now it does not mean that I'm against Etoys and Etoys has the Etoys 40 image (note that we collected in 3.9 most of the etoys fixes with little support from Etoyers which forked way before, we did the same with the fixes of diego of Smalltalk). But again you can judge otherwise. About the ranting or the little war between Squeak and Pharo ====================================== Frankly I'm tired about us ranting against Squeak/andreas/... and the inverse. For example Traits are cool, Javascript and PHP will probably have them as Perl-6, Scala, Fortress. Now Squeak can remove them. I have no problem with that. Seriously this is your decision. People in squeak-dev can freely say negative points about me if this helps. I decided that I will not rant nor get negative feelings about that. I found the red pill :) *I* decided that I want to head to the future. So we will not rant nor make any bad statement about the past anymore. Not even report history or on old facts: if you were there you should remember, else there is the archive :). This is my last mail on the past. Frankly I have the best job I can dream about. I'm lucky just check my h-index for the fun, I have more than most researchers I know. In addition, I loved working and learning from people like lukas, adrian, nicolas, levente, marcus, ..... The next 10 years should be the best of my life and I will take advantage of that. I want to have **10/15** years of pure fun and I will do it. I want and will create positive energy. Look at ESUG we are doing a great job. About cross dialect energy ================= Now the key point of this mail. I **deeply** appreciate the attitude of people like nicolas, levente, and igor that do not bash us and help Pharo but also Squeak. I sent this message mainly because of their attitude. I'm sad to see all this (their) energy duplicated. We cleaned and improved a lot Pharo over the last two years (more than you may think) and we will continue. Squeak could have benefitted from it. Nicolas luckily for you pushed a lot of our fixes in Squeak already. I'm getting the fixes of Squeak that are interesting for Pharo. Now depending on the Squeak vision we could share some common things. May be we can build a better future together but not at all price. You see our goals is to get a clean, lean, flexible and robust system. If you want to share something with us let us know. You know now the vision of Pharo. Squeak may want to compete with us too. This is ok too. If you want to help us building our vision you are welcome. Our logo is a lighthouse and it means that it will stand and last long because it has to guide boats. So we will continue Pharo against tempests and giant waves :) https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/26678/pharoVideo.zip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2LeNBY_5gk The video is really cool (dan this is the one you wanted on waves). Stef