"I'm probably not contributing anything of value to this conversation... :-) IMHO, most people who settle on Smalltalk aren't "not experienced with other language".
Pierce" No idea where you have drawn that conclusion maybe it was true in the past or outside Pharo but Pharo is mostly used for web apps and that means you have to know both HTML5/CSS and Javascript and SQL for databases. Sticking to a single language is rarely a good idea mainly because even though languages are meant to be used for everything they have to a degree specific areas that they excel which makes them ideal choices for those situations. "As Guile explained it, it is a matter of responsibility to include a package in the Pharo image. The more packages in the base Pharo image the more complicated is the release process for the Pharo team, and more stress, etc." I think that's an overgeneralisation and a really lousy excuses. If conflicts occur between versions then its not the library that needs to be blamed but Pharo itself. Backward compatibility is a necessary evil in the end. When Pharo started indeed it went through a period of flux with many deep redesigns etc of course those things are a headache for those that maintain packages inside or outside the Pharo official distribution. Those braking enhancements were necessary to establish a healthy and stable code base and very much welcomed. However the honeymoon period has ended and Pharo cannot afford to brake compatibility anymore since more and more people are using it and none of us will be happy if we have to rewrite our software from scratch to accommodate new redesigns of Pharo code base in each version. An example is Python, Python 3 did brake backward compatibility with Python 2, because its creator Guido felt it was time for a deep redesign and most people agreed with him. But even though users approved the new improvements the cost for Python was massive . Python 3 was released in 2008 , 8 years later and still Python 2 is by far the most popular choice for python coders. It even been a reason not to use Python at all because of the brake between version 2 and 3. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/2016/03/08/python-3-is-winning/ So after 8 years , at last , Python 3 has catch up with Python 2 , mainly because all new projects chose python 3 and all old ones stick with Python 2. 8 years is how many years Pharo has been around. This has led the creator of Python to even claim that he regrets making Python 3 non backward compatible with Python and please note Python 3 comes with a special tool that can convert Python 2 code to Python 3 automagically. Still because the tool was far from perfect people chose to stick with Python 2. So for a stable environment that retains backward compatibility the cost of maintenance of individual packages should be zero to close to zero. Saying that my experience with my own code base shown me that in real life scenarios the maintenance is very little since after version 4 , Pharo has not done any radical change. In any case if Pharo is a pain to maintain , even only under the condition that a ton of packages added to it, we must wonder as a community whether this is the direction we want to go. Pharo will inevitably grow in popularity which will make its usage in big software more likely if maintenance cost is high it defeats the purpose of using Smalltalk in the first place.
