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Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Within a few months, they find their way in a new world with a justified degree of confidence that is radically novel for them; within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically novel dimension. To my taste and style, that is what education is about. Universities should not be afraid of teaching radical novelties; on the contrary, it is their calling to welcome the opportunity to do so. Their willingness to do so is our main safeguard against dictatorships, be they of the proletariat, of the scientific establishment, or of the corporate elite.
Pharo is a fork from the Squeak open-source Smalltalk. We decided to start Pharo because as active Squeakers, and responsible for Squeak 3.9, we felt the need to reconsider choices made. We want to create a better Smalltalk and be free to enhance it without fear of backwards compatibility.
There is an important aspect behind Pharo: we want to make sure that Pharo is not a copy of the past but really a reinvention of Smalltalk. Now big-bang approaches rarely succeed. We will really favor evolutionary and incremental changes. We want to be able to experiment with important new features or libraries. For example, we need a new file library but that's unlikely to happen in a day. Evolution means that we accept mistakes, we are not aiming for the next perfect solution in one big step -- even if we would love it. We will favor small incremental changes but a multitude of them. We will pay attention to your submissions to improve the system.
"This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization [...] we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future."
How to build a static library for the iPhone OS with Apple's XCode-based SDK. It's not well-documented but it's not difficult.
