31–40 of 114 posts
I had the "pleasure" of attending an OOP course at uni taught by Stéphane Ducasse. I didn't learn much OOP but i learned that pharo is an utter piece of garbage. The IDE randomly crashes, corrupts images (all your work is in the persistent image) and randomly ignores clicks making it insanely frustrating to use. Git integration is "WIP" which means it sometimes silently deletes files or you just don't get it to work…
Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming
For those who don't know what I am talking about, there are several families of languages where the state of your program is kept within an image. The upside of this is that you can integrate everything together in a really neat way and build neat tooling with introspection. The downside is that you have just made what's going on not visible from the filesystem, and have to replace all of the tooling that you're used to. You know, things like your favorite editor, command line programs, source control...
If you switch languages regularly (which most developers do in my experience), being able to use your favorite toolset everywhere turns out to be more important than being able to build an ideal toolset for only one language.
> It is very easy to learn... > This Mooc is demanding but rewarding... So the language is easy to learn and yet the course to learn it is demanding? Interesting logic... Nevertheless, probably a good exercise for anybody who wants to learn what real Object Orientation is about and who didn't learn Smalltalk yet.
The language itself is simple[1] but the environment and tools aren't. Smalltalk is a world in itself which is both its strength and weakness. https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/smalltalk/
Nevertheless, I find the argument on their website kinda odd and a bit confusing. I mean, I see a lot of Smalltalk advocates claiming the language is so simple to learn and at the same time I see a lot of programmers having trouble learning it.
Maybe it is just wrong to call it 'very easy to learn' just because the syntax is simple.
Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming
I agree that it is a language worth understanding. However the OO model of Ruby is identical. Without the drawbacks of being an image based language. So I'd suggest learning that instead. For those who don't know what I am talking about, there are several families of languages where the state of your program is kept within an image. The upside of this is that you can integrate everything together in a really neat way…
I independently arrived at the same conclusion. The main problem with Pharo is the esoteric tooling; life is too short to struggle with tools.
That said, I consider Smalltalk, Objects and Design by Chamond Liu to be one of the best books I ever read on the subject of object oriented programming. Heartily recommended.
This is kind of an offtopic question, but regardless: Is there any application written in smalltalk in the debian repository? (or any other linux distro)
MOOSE, which is some sort of code analysis tool:
http://www.moosetechnology.org/
I've never been able to make heads or tails of it, but it's kind of an architect-level tool and I'm just a lowly engineer.
Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming
Isn't Pharo a different language from Smalltalk?
Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming
I agree that it is a language worth understanding. However the OO model of Ruby is identical. Without the drawbacks of being an image based language. So I'd suggest learning that instead. For those who don't know what I am talking about, there are several families of languages where the state of your program is kept within an image. The upside of this is that you can integrate everything together in a really neat way…
Smalltalk is much more than the OO model.
This is kind of an offtopic question, but regardless: Is there any application written in smalltalk in the debian repository? (or any other linux distro)
The first one that comes to mind is the scratch package[1]. The entire scratch language, as far as I know, runs on top of squeak [1] https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/trusty/scratch
Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming
I agree that it is a language worth understanding. However the OO model of Ruby is identical. Without the drawbacks of being an image based language. So I'd suggest learning that instead. For those who don't know what I am talking about, there are several families of languages where the state of your program is kept within an image. The upside of this is that you can integrate everything together in a really neat way…
While Pharo (and Squeak, etc.) have baked in editors and source control, Pharo has integrating with general tools as a design goal. It includes an integrated Git client and can load packages from or move them into a Git repository.