Yes, we intend to make Pyret general-purpose indeed: certainly general enough to solve all of our _own_ programming tasks.

However, it’s really important when starting out to have some way of focusing, and some way of making consistent decisions. We find that asking “How will that play out in a setting with students new to computing?” has been very productive and a good filter.

We’re in fact using it to create some pretty innovative curricula (e.g., what we’re calling “lightweight data science”). This is content that will have natural uses beyond teaching programming.

Thanks for the clear explanation, Warren.

The actual Pharo team sees Pharo as something that moves beyond “Smalltalk” the language, which has its last official “standard” in 1980, “Smalltalk-80”.

This is not too different a situation from the Delphi language, which some people call ObjectPascal, but it’s clearly so far past Pascal that it’s silly to call Delphi just “Pascal”. Pascal as Wirth envisioned it didn’t have objects, let alone generic types or interfaces.

In the case of Pharo, the internals have evolved without a need to extend the base language syntax, but as Smalltalk is both a VM, and a language, and a set of facilities for coding, calling it just “smalltalk” is understating what it contains and what it can do. It’s a smalltalk-based ecosystem containing many fascinating tools.

It originated as a fork of Squeak smalltalk but it’s grown a LOT since then.

Fair enough. 🙂

Sure. And an order of magnitude more people have probably used Haskell than have ever even heard of Elixir. 😉

I was just surprised to see languages that are quite popular in programming circles (Rust is Mozilla) and general use (Haxe has basically taken over everywhere Flash used to rule and a lot of web) in the list next to relative unknowns (even I haven’t heard of Gosu).

(Array-oriented languages are a highly recommended exercise for everyone, btw. They’ll change how you think about data.)

Rust, because the Borrow Checker is pretty unique. We need safer systems programming languages.

D, because its meta programming capabilities are awesome. The C++ committees are very busy copying stuff from D.

The average programmer wouldn’t even know that Haskell exists. Just saying. 🙂

This isn’t to say they’re bad (I’ve been a Haxe evangelist since 2007 or so), but I feel like they’ve got a lot of buzz about them already.