Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whelp, didn't make it in time and I can't edit anymore... Here's what I wanted to write: I don't want to talk about Pharo. Please, don't make me talk about Pharo at length. Even a short summary will be painful... But I'll do it anyway if only to have something to link to in the future. In short: Pharo is the worst Smalltalk out there, with a community that is small, elitist, and entirely unconcerned with user experie…
Cuis is a really interesting incarnation. It's quite stripped down, and Juan, the creator, has done a lot of work to simplify things as much as possible. He has even stripped down Morphic and has an early working version of its "successor," which is vector based. The dual problem with the open source Smalltalks is that there aren't enough people working on them, and the community that is working on them is fractured.
That's very interesting, actually, I didn't know, thanks. Morphic is not a bad idea in itself - the problem is that its implementations are ~30 years behind the times, and slapping framework after framework on it won't make the pig fly. But, rethinking and modernizing the ideas behind the base implementation might be a way to make all those frameworks work properly, finally. I will pay attention to Cuis more.
> The dual problem with the open source Smalltalks is that there aren't enough people working on them, and the community that is working on them is fractured.
No, the problem is that the open source Smalltalk community comes from academia mostly, plus some hobbyists, and they are by and large simply poor software engineers. Smalltalk is capable enough to allow them to get what they want more-or-less working, and quickly, but the code is a mess. The authors then go on to write their dissertations or publish some papers, which generates a bit of interest in the project. But then two things happen, almost every time: a) the author gets the promotion or title they wanted and leave the project; and b) the people who got interested in the project are met with a steaming pile of garbage code that modifies half of the Kernel category for no reason at all, has methods with 100+ lines of code, has complex hierarchies that were abandoned halfway but left in the code, has no or almost no comments, the names of identifiers are incomprehensible abbreviations, and so on. Coupled with "move fast, break things" of Pharo, this results in the project stagnating and then quickly stopping to work altogether, other than with the original image (if you're lucky and the author actually posted the image).
Diving into the world of commercial Smalltalks showed me that it's actually possible to write solid, extensible, well documented, tested and stable Smalltalk code. Later, looking at Cuis showed me that it is in fact possible to do the same with open source implementation, but you need a strong leadership, a vision, and skills that most of the Pharo community is simply not interested in having.
Note: this is the first ever time where I'm knowingly, willingly, and somewhat brutally attack or complain about a particular community. I'm really tolerant. I can deal with a lot. But half of the Discord channel shouting at me and calling me names like "masochist" just because I want Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E work as Home and End in the editor? That was too much, even for me.