Stefanne Ducasse gave a presentation on Pharo - what it does, what it's going to do and most importantly, the motivations behind it.

I did not fully realize, although in retrospect it's quite clear, that Pharo only exists because of a social schism between Pharo's developers and the Squeak community. They were apparently called "random refactorers" which is quite amusing. But the crux of the problem is the desire to break Squeak up in to modular parts - etoys and other projects are deeply embedded in to the image and it's hard to modularize without breakification.

This has led to the creation of Pharo, which is a benevolent dictatorship, instead of the anarchism of Squeak. In Squeak, you have the freedom to do whatever you want, which means no one gets anything done (this is a broad generalization, they do get plenty done). In Pharo, things such as "Should we use traits?" actually get a definite yes or no answer from the ruling class.

Committers for Pharo must sign an agreement that their contributions are under the MIT license. This means Pharo is is MIT clean.

Possibly the biggest issue with the Squeak/Pharo split is how Pharo has taken Seaside with it. In fact, as of this ESUG, the supported platform for Seaside is now Pharo - the one click images are Pharo, the build images are Pharo. So here we have a case of "Fine, we'll fork our own Squeak, and we'll take Seaside with us" .. this is especially bad for Squeak since the majority of the buzz around Squeak of late has been Seaside.

I suspect other high profile projects, things like Croquet, may similarly find their way to Pharo over time. Why? Because Pharo is already a cleaner Squeak and they have continued plans to remove more of the unnecessary code. They have also committed over 700 bug fixes in to Pharo beyond what is available in Squeak. The pace that this team set with Squeak 3.9 has continued in to Pharo.

One important point to note from the presentation was this: The hostility got bad enough that they had considered moving to a different language entirely, like python or ruby. Lucky for us they decided to fork Squeak instead.

From users of Pharo, I have been told that the responsiveness of the team when you report a bug is fast, compared to the same process in Squeak where your bug report and/or fix may simply become lost in the crowd. When you fire up Pharo you won't be greeted with the psychotic colours of Squeak either, it has a MacOSX Look and Feel.

These are big changes in the Squeak world, Pharo may actually side line Squeak entirely. During the presentation, James Robertson asked what Pharos relationship was with the Squeak Board.. the answer? none, none at all. On the same token, some of the people behind Pharo are the people behind ESUG.. this is not a Squeak event in the slightest.

It appears that Pharo has a bright future, with a direct and motivated team.. while Squeak will continue to swirl without direction.