On Sunday 28 Jun 2009 9:02:05 pm Ian Trudel wrote:
> Squeak is stuck in some time warp, where the surrounding world is on
> stand still. It should however consider that we are living in 2009 and
> have needs of 2009. We need a different usability, developer tools and
> we have different goals. For example, Squeak hardly support the
> requirements of my distributors, which makes it overly challenging for
> me to consider Squeak as our platform of development
Squeak was created by researchers as a platform for programmers to build 
purely object-based systems around a portable compact Smalltalk kernel. 3.6 
and 3.8 showed what is possible along this direction. To me it looks like it 
has served its original purpose well. It was not intended to be a industrial 
strength deployment platform. It has no modularity, supportability, 
scalability etc. That gap is to be filled by downstream projects like Etoys, 
Seaside, Sophie, Croquet and others.

What Squeak lacks is a clear enunciation of its value proposition. The opening 
para of squeak.org is too general and leaves gaps. A short para that crisply 
answers all the following questions:

   what is it primarily? - a programming environment, runtime, a kernel, a 
research workbench for virtual machines?
   who is the intended audience? researchers? industrial programmers? advanced 
programmers?
 what is the primary purpose? prototyping? demos? test beds?
  what are its nearest competitive technology? Java? Flash?
  What is uniquely different (and much better) from these?

Such a para will serve to set expectations early and clearly. As Smalltalk and 
its ideas propagate through the universe, we will encounter audience whose 
needs are not served by the current proposition. If Pharo aims to cater to 
such  audience why should it not develop into a mutant strain? Why should it 
be backward compatible with Squeak?

Subbu