I think of Pharo as a bit like Racket: it intentionally is distanced a bit from the parent language to avoid being limited to the design of that language. For example: the word “Smalltalk” isn’t anywhere on the homepage of the project.

I'm not so sure that's the only reason to intentionally distance from the "SmallTalk" brand. There might be a advertising benefit, too, since ST is sometimes maligned for having "lost".

Even without active malignment, Smalltalk is largely perceived as a historical curiosity of primarily academic interest. Even among many people who like it.

Since Pharo wants to position itself as a modern, industrial programming language, it makes sense that the project would want to distance itself from that reputation.

But if you look at the hero myth is the wrong strategy. It's like the immature hero that wants to hide who his father is because is ashamed for some immature reason hence demonstrating that is not ready yet for the challenge of the world. The alternative is, embrace his history, have a clear own identity, and yet come back and rescue his father (not the project but the spirit) "from the belly of the beast" and improve itself and the world by doing so. Not doing it like that will not fit the psychological archetypes of the good stories that marketing needs and fail and waste a lot of effort having at the end of the day to always admit it is a Smalltalk. Not all products can aspire to be legends. This is one that can do it.

"A position (or statement of position) is a cold-hearted, no-nonsense statement of how you are perceived in the minds of prospects. It is your position."

> Until then, call pharo what it is. An interesting, in some ways innovative, FORK OF SQUEAK SMALLTALK.

This, precisely. Pharo is a fork of Squeak Smalltalk, and Squeak Smalltalk is a direct descendant of Smalltalk-80.

(And a common thread in Smalltalk implementations and versions from Smalltalk-72 to Squeak is the illustrious Dan Ingalls.)

Still, Smalltalk has nothing on Lisp or BASIC in terms of dialects/variants/versions. ;-)

Some people are very picky and only accept Smalltalk-80 as "Smalltalk". Of course, that would make Smalltalk-72, -74, -76 and even -78 not Smalltalk, which would be very odd.

I, on the other hand, consider Self and Slate to be good examples of Smalltalk.

Beyond any technical discussions there is the marketing issue. Smalltalk's reputation took a major hit in the 1990s with the rise of Java (from the "language of the future that doesn't run on the computers you have, yet" it became "a failed language of the past") and association with the name can hurt a project in some cases.

I did not help that major Smalltalk vendors like IBM, decided to replace their Smalltalk product line with Java ones.

Eclipse grew out from Visual Age series.

Or that Sun repurposed Strongtalk for Hotspot.

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank YOU for taking the TIME and EFFORT to attempt to OUTLAW the BARBARIC PRACTICE of using capital letters in written communications, to convey a slightly ELEVATED tone.

Err ... oops ... ;-)