[jecel]

But that "better than Smalltalk" would not be Squeak, so I still present the system to people as "Squeak Smalltalk".

While the goal of Pharo is to encourage research even while breaking compatibility (possibly making it not Smalltalk at some point in the future), Squeak is way more conservative. The various SqueakFest events that happened were actually mostly about EToys used by children and teachers and at least some in the Squeak community have keeping that running a priority.

Personally I do use Squeak to research future languages as Alan intended, and it is also a great tool for that.

[xkriva11]

I personally think that one reason why Alan lost his interrest in Squeak was partly based on the community that was too conservative and too much Smalltalk-80 oriented - while Smalltalk does not fit into his vision well already since 1976.

[jecel]

Alan wanted what eventually became EToys for his Apple projects. They looked into doing it in Java but figured that digging the old Apple Smalltalk-80 out of the trash bin and cleaning it up would be less effort. So we got Squeak.

Then they did Etoys stuff at Disney and some other neat experiments. Then Alan moved on to 3D shared environments[1] and later to recreating personal computing in 20K lines of code[2]. The idea was to build it on top of Ian Piumarta's COLA[3][4] but to get something out the door they ended up using a stripped down version of Squeak instead. So moving on from Squeak is harder than Alan hoped.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_OS

[2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

[3] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf

[4] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2006003a_objmod.pdf