On 28 April 2018 at 21:49, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:
Nicolas Cellier wrote
> The growing gap with Pharo is not helping and is really annoying me

+1 but what can be done? The divergence is more and more fundamental e.g.
namespaces are only available on Squeak, stateful Traits/real packages
(RPackage) only on Pharo. For a time, I tried to sync all my projects
between the two, but the effort is exponential, and it wasn't even clear if
there would be users…

This will only get worse with Pharo moving to Bloc and presumably 
Squeak dependent projects requiring Morphic for a long time.


The only (unrealistic) solution that ever came to my mind would be a
reunification - why (besides politically and due to personalities) do cuis,
pharo, and squeak have to be independent projects?

Personalities and politics (i.e. differing opinions/objectives/goals, not gamesmanship)
are what drive the world.  Open source is about being able to scratch *your* own itch.
So different projects that can have different agendas makes sense rather than 
antagnoise everyone trying to squeeze all those different agendas into one box...

 
Now that Pharo is
bootstrapped, couldn't the energy of Cuis to have a small, clean system be
poured into that effort? Could Squeak be a layer on top with all the cool
stuff reimplemented. Well, it's a dream, but maybe fragmentation is just the
way of the world/human beings…

If Squeak saw some value in having a similar bootstrap, 
then leveraging Pharo's efforts would make sense and might result in 
some *known* common minimal stage (e.g. pre-GUI) between distributions. 
Maintenance effort could then at least be shared at that level.

Such a minimal common bootstrap would probably suit being hosted under the OpenSmalltalk banner.

Perhaps that could even be an attractive path for Dolphin to move to 64-bit, 
rather than the effort to maintain their own VM.  
That would really make in impact on perceptions on Smalltalk in the outside market.
Its a dream...  I can't guess how palatable that would be for various parties.

cheers -ben