This wasn’t a critique to Pharo. Don’t get me wrong I worked using Smalltalk professionally for 3 years, and I contributed a small library to Squeak and Pharo.
My comment was about how difficult is to innovate in areas like the file system.
Pharo had to use git because is popular, not because is the best way to handle object versioning (eg Envy was much better at handling the history of your classes)
More like "Where's the program?"
Early '80s Smalltalk did use change-sets in files.
p462 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment"
https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...
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You're right, Smalltalk is about "modifying objects that represent classes and methods" rather than editing files.
So versioning means fine-grained "classes and methods" rather than versioning files.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...
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You're right, we know what we like - we like what we know.
So (Pharo) "Manage Your Code with Git and Iceberg"
https://books.pharo.org/booklet-ManageCode/pdf/2020-05-12-Ma...