The history link gives details, but if you want a quick analogy:
Pharo & Cuis both forked from squeak at roughly the same time
Squeak = Debian
Pharo = Arch
Cuis = Alpine
Cuis has rigorously simplified, so its much easier to explore & understand the system - because there's less of it
Cuis's re-engineering of morphic is really quite brilliant. Everything is hardware accelerated vector graphics. EVEN THE FONTS are drawn that way. And they remain crisp even when zoomed (in or out) & rotated.
Pharo does have some cool stuff though. I'd love to see fuel (object serialization) & soil (a fully oo database) ported to cuis. And the big one - seaside
But its not an either-or situation. 99% 9f what you learn & do in one is applicable to the other. But if you're starting out, I would definitely recommend cuis (not implying that you wouldn't necessarily stick with it)
Is the development experience compatible with modern AI-assisted workflows? Coding agents have drastically reduced the entry barrier for playing with software projects, and I can think of some fun ideas for Smalltalk things I've been curious about.
I saw a comment saying it is, and having a coding agent able to modify a running environment is a game changer, but I haven't wrapped my head around that yet.
AI isn't my personal cup of tea, but anyway. There is a monthly "show your cool stuff" online meetup, and the most recent one was directly about one dude using AI to build his own quasi-gnome-desktop-like morphic world within cuis.
Cuis is an environment derived from Squeak as I understand it with all the "clutter" removed. So it is really a cut-down Squeak. Just as Pharo was a cut-down Squeak originally.
For me it was easier and quicker to get something done in Cuis than in any other Smalltalk (Squeak, Pharo, VA, Dolphin).
Cuis is the easiest entrypoint into modern Smalltalk. All the others have so, so much stuff (great stuff, just a lot of it). Cuis takes the approach of paring things down to something minimal. You can understand everything from top to bottom fairly easily.
"There is now very strong incentive to develop alternatives that bypass what Iran can effect, which is exactly what’s happening. It will take a while for the infrastructure to come online, but as the months and eventually years go by, Iran will find its biggest lever for control rapidly diminishing even if the war was stopped now. Likewise, the move to EV’s will likely accelerate."
I am old enough to have lived through the oil shocks in New Zealand. It got so bad the government rolled out an alternative fuel system network of compressed natural gas. Many fuel stations had installed the tanks and pumps and many cars were converted to it. NZ has gas deposits enough to meet all its own demands.
As soon as the oil shock was over it was all ripped out and we all went back to oil.
Currently using it to build a mostly static website (with Pocketbase & lighttpd). A good experience all round.
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