Squeak forks

Pharo once forked from Squeak ... some people were happy, others angry. And there were IMHO unnecessary posts like this. However - Squeak is still alive and growing. As well as any of its forks.

Pharo and Squeak play nicely next to each other and both communities not only share history and virtual machine but also members and code/fixes.

Pharo took away the pressure from Squeak to be more like other Smalltalk IDEs. Squeak could continue to be the media and etoy Smalltalk. It's still the best environment to experiment with computing ideas.

And we can now use Pharo to introduce business people to (open source) Smalltalk as these two new indendent posts again prove: read here and here.

So IMHO I think it was a good step, especially since other forks like Cuis started to explorer new areas too. There are also other nice forks like the Squeak NOS project or the Croquet/OpenCobalt story with Krestianstvo and the new OpenQwaq. Cool!

I started with Squeak in version 1.0, right after Andreas created a VM port for Windows and helped to move it forward with code and words. Currently I concentrate on Pharo, otherwise I would be lost in all these nice projects. But I follow all the Squeak forks very closely.

It is really exciting to see all these different faces of Squeak and Smalltalk in general.