Sometimes conversations revolve around perceived deficiencies in Pharo. What Pharo is missing. Or what Pharo doesn't do as well as my previous language, my favorite language, my other language, etc... These conversations are necessary to understand where Pharo is and to provide understanding on where Pharo needs some work. However, not enough gets said sometimes for all the goodness Pharo already provides and thanks to all of those who have contributed over the years to Smalltalk/Pharo. I know sometimes we get stuck in the minutiae and lose the big picture. I just want to say thanks to all that have contributed to Pharo in big and small way. Thank you. A special thanks to Stef, Marcus and company who have been working hard on this all the way back when it was still Squeak. Who had a vision for a clean, empowering, business ready, vision fulfilling Smalltalk inspired tool we call Pharo. Thanks. And a thanks to Eliot and all who contribute on the VM side of things. Enabling us to have a nicely performing and stable vm to run the Pharo image. My apologies for not naming everyone who deserves thanks. I intend no offense to anyone not named, but also deserving. Your names are included in all the contributor documentation. Thanks. And while I am being thankful, which is a good habit for all of us to be in. Being thankful not only improves the spirits of those being thanked. But those of us who are grateful are the biggest beneficiaries. I want to take time to appreciate some things in Pharo that make us appreciate having a tool like Pharo and which distinguishes itself from other languages and environments. I think these things either distinguish themselves either in the relative uniqueness or in quality of their implementation. They are not necessarily distinguishing from other Smalltalks but from other non-Smalltalk languages. Superior persistent live object environment. This is the game changer and affects and enables all other benefits. """I'm not complaining. I know that there is a good chance that we break the system when improving it. I have no problem with that and I prefer a living system with some bugs for a while than a dead system with no bug""" Stef - Sept. 7, 2015 IDE, debugging and refactoring, all live, all the time. Because of the truly persistent live environment, there is no concept of shutdown, restart. We only know hibernate and resume. This is to use OS terms. For me this is an amazing boost to productivity. I can at any time save my image. Even close my saved image and resume exactly where I stopped. At any time, on any supported OS, on any machine. Powerful. There truly is no edit, compile, run cycle similar to other languages, even dynamically typed languages with REPLs. If I am not in Pharo, even if that language has an amazing notebook or repl available. It is nothing like coding in the live environment. The separation of editor and the compiler and/or application or VM makes development not as smooth and fluid. Even if I can enter and execute code in a notebook or repl to explore and learn in a version of a live environment. I still at some point have to leave my editing environment and write, edit and save my source code. And yes there are languages, editors, IDEs and tools that attempt to close the gap. But no, there still is a significant gap. The edited source code is the only thing that persists. Everything that gets executed in the repl or notebook is transient and will go away. MIT, equivalent or better licensed ecosystem. For me these are game changers. They set a standard by which I view any other programming experience. Thusly all other programming experience falls far short. Whenever I (we) experience a present weakness in Pharo. Remember the above. Not only does Pharo have these distinguishing factors. I do not know of any language or environment which even has a culture or worldview of programming which seeks to bring these features to their favored language or tools. Every time I have to restart my computer I think, Smalltalk solved this decades ago. Ugh!!! Where is my Pharo machine. :) If you have any Pharo distinctives that you appreciate and would like to share. Reply and let us know. What I mean by distinctive is something that Pharo (or Smalltalk) has that is either not in other languages or is in general significantly inferior. Especially those that other languages have no vision to ever have. It just isn't a part of who they are. If we keep these things before us as we work through the tedious work of cleaning the image, repairing fail attempts at various things. Or anything that may be a frustration for the moment, but is temporary. Remember what we gain and are blessed with having, that we would lose any where else. Or at a minimum have a far inferior substitute. And look forward to what we will have as these things become complete. The future is ours. Let's enjoy the journey. Just some thoughts in my head I wanted to let out. This is reminder to me. If any of you are blessed and inspired, that is a plus. Thanks and Shalom. Jimmie