Hi guys, 

I saw the interest in GUI lately and today I come across this really well researched master thesis paper that can put some light on how good we can perform in the GUI spectrum in terms of practicality, expressivity and productivity

Introduction

Even though OOP was born with the SIMULA programming language in the 1960s [15], it was Smalltalk that coupled GUI development with the OOP paradigm [25]. Smalltalk���s inventor Alan Kay was inspired by SIMULA, among other influences, to create a new language for graphics-oriented applications leveraging the OOP paradigm ��� and the rest is history [24]. Ever since Smalltalk successfully showed the promise of OOP for GUI development a great deal of subsequent OOP languages and, particularly, object-oriented GUI toolkits came into existence and eventually into the mainstream. Nearly all mainstream programming languages today directly support the OOP paradigm and there is hardly any widely used GUI toolkit that does not use OOP. Various popular examples of toolkits like Cocoa, WinForms, Qt, wxWidgets, Tk, Swing and GTK+1 all seem to validate the notion of OOP and GUI development being a good fit. 

continues: http://www.eugenkiss.com/projects/thesis.pdf

And it seems it triggered this movement of people that are open to receive implementations of the seven dimensions of this benchmark in his repo:

https://github.com/eugenkiss/7guis/wiki

I beleive Pharo can score nicely there and if would be a Pharo implementation there a whole new audience (that we probably aren't reaching now) might take a serious try

from mobile