Versioning actually tends to work better in Pharo/Squeak because once you have a version system dedicated to one language you're free to go ahead and understand the syntax of that language. I'm not sure how much of that they take advantage of today but there was talk several years ago of doing things like this.

i think you might be referring to this:

http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Montice...

i haven't really watched monticello 2, but last I remember you're essentially merging packages in and out of your vm.

it really depends on what your goals are, and I guess the old discussion of visual and non visual programming also applies a little bit to the vm, non vm smalltalk discussion.

personally i like to avoid magic whenever i can

What's wrong with monticello? Ecosystem is a valid point, but I don't see problems with collaboration and versioning

Especially with the work that has gone into have a git backend for Monticello.

well as i mentioned above the whole idea behind monticello goes hand in hand with the idea of having to program a/in a vm. you may like the vm/object structure more than a file based structure, but ymmv.

not to mention that when we were evaluating squeak a year or so back git was nothing more than a half assed gsoc project.

but even so, the fact that you can pipe anything into git one way or another doesn't change the fact that they are conceptually different, but if it does, feel free to correct me.

If anything, Monticello and many of the collaboration practices in Smalltalk were intellectual forerunners to git.

I thought the frontrunner to git was bitkeeper, which as all the other versioning systems grew out of the experiences from DVS, which i guess refers to what you said, but bitkeeper was built long before monticello.

how does git backend for monticello work? does it turn objects into text so they can be versioned in git? if so that's exactly what dvs was doing for cvs.

see: http://www.stic.st/conferences/stic12/stic12-abstracts/pract...

Perhaps you are confusing vm and image?