It has basically two reasons. First, it is to prevent conflicts like: "Pharo is Smalltalk, look, it is written on its web page! How do dare you to change this? You are allowed to improve this if and only if all the other Smalltalk implementations do that too!" [exaggerating]. Pharo has many differences from standard Smalltalk (different File API, class definitions, traits, slots, small grammar changes...).

The second reason is that the general knowledge about Smalltalk is very poor, and most people only remember that it is something old and long dead. Try to sell a dead fish.

Interesting, thank you. It still seems weird to me, though. I feel Smalltalk is mostly mentioned with positive connotations (as opposed to, say Cobol) and would guess more people have heard of Smalltalk than Pharo and it would help orientation. So I was assuming something nefarious :)

Is there an overview of the differences somewhere?

I sometimes ask young programmers or people interested in old computers if they know Smalltalk and what they think of it. Try it too, you might be surprised at the results.

I don't know of any such list of differences, and I don't think it's of much use either.There is ANSI Smalltalk, which is very limited and most implementations go well beyond its scope, so you have to compare each implementation separately anyway.

> cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke

March 7, 1988

"Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95"

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=P...

> nasty-looking non-native GUIs

The "non-native GUI" was quite important because Smalltalk was running on MS-DOS — not on MS-Windows.

Well $200 in 1980s is something like $500 today. I don't think I own any piece of software costing that much.

That seems like an ahistorical objection.

$199 was a very reasonable price for a powerful dev tool in 1988. A lot of software at the time cost much, much more. Look up historical prices for just about any contemporaneous commercial software.

You can still argue they would have done better in the long run by marketing themselves as "Turbo Smalltalk" at $69.99. But that's a different argument than "wow that's way overpriced," which simply wasn't the case.

"The list price is $150 each for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and for a bundle containing both Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger."

p8 October 1988 https://books.google.com/books?id=WSBVAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA18-PA8

Smalltalk/V 286 included source-code debugger, bit mapped WIMP for MS-DOS, BitBlt graphics, … Turbo Pascal + debugger already cost more.

And … ?

Dec 1988, MS Word 5.0 for MS-DOS, $450.

Adobe products can cost that much on a yearly basis.

The animated screenshots on the website pretty much indicate that the Pharo GUI is still non native and looking very dated and ugly.

Most tools were modified to use Spec framework so they can use the native look (using GTK) as well as the non-native one. (plus, in future, Web and Console backends). This transition should be finished in the next release.

hm, does Pharo have native-looking GUI now?

Well, let's say "better" :-) There was a Smalltalk with a native Windows GUI (Dolphin) but the developers couldn't seem to make any money out if it.

"ParcPlace VisualWorks Smalltalk emulates all the supported operating systems GUIs in Smalltalk …

Digitalk (now ParcPlace) Visual Smalltalk uses more of the underlying operating system GUI, for better performance but at the price of only supporting a common subset of GUI controls …

IBM Smalltalk maps the Motif GUI widgets onto the underlying operating system widgets.This means you get a very rich kit to build your GUI, but the widgets operate at near native speed. You have the best of both worlds."

p87 "VisualAge for Smalltalk" 1997

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/4instantiations/sg24482...

aka What's the difference between Swing and SWT,

see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843214