It's true, Smalltalk faces the same dilemma as Linux and Lisp. As a /family/ of languages, portability is a genuine issue.
There's no getting around this dichotomy. You can have either a flexibility of choice or the tyranny of one standard, but not both. The decision is a fact of life that we face frequently. You can have either the flexibility of dynamic typing or the safety of static typing, but not both. You can have either the natural modelling of the real world due to state mutation or the mathematical safety of immutability, but not both. You can have either the portability of a virtual machine or the close-to-the-metal performance of native code generation, but not both (JIT compilation notwithstanding). Life is about choices. There will always be a place for different technologies. Smalltalk will not always be the ideal choice. That's why there are five entirely different languages that dominate our industry (Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, C++). There is no reason why there can't be a sixth, especially if it can dramatically improve our productivity and make programming less cognitively stressful. Surely, that's worth fighting for. Enough? Richard O'Keefe wrote > Here is a challenge: What is "Smalltalk"? > VAST, VW, and Pharo are quite different environments. > To the extent that they share a common syntax (which > they don't, quite), fine, but porting nontrivial > code between them is NOT easy. They certainly have > very little in common as GUI kits. All praise and > thanks to the people who *have* ported stuff. > > > On Tue, 11 Aug 2020 at 01:05, Richard Kenneth Eng < > horrido.hobbies@ > > > wrote: > >> https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/08/10/smalltalks-successor/ >> >> A bold claim. It'll be interesting to see if anybody challenges me on >> this. >> >> -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
