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Pharo MOOC

mooc.pharo.org

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Re: Pharo MOOC

#51

Post by btilly »

coldtea wrote: post #38
btilly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree that it is a language worth understanding. However the OO model of Ruby is identical. Smalltalk is much more than the OO model.

And yet if your goal is to learn about OO programming from the concepts of its OO model, then either language is good and Ruby is more convenient.

On the other hand if your intent is to learn about its collection classes, what MVC looked like in its original inspiration, and so on, then you should learn Smalltalk.

There is more to learn than any of us has time for. If you know what you hope to get out of learning something like X, then you should pick the most convenient X around to learn it.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#52

Post by btilly »

dragonwriter wrote: post #40
btilly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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... 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 pa…

Per https://www.peteruhnak.com/blog/2016/07/25/how-to-use-git-an... as of 2 years ago Pharo did not have an established convenient way to integrate with git. Per https://github.com/pharo-vcs/iceberg the current best solution for that is still an experimental tool, so you have to be careful. Being able to integrate with other version control systems is still off in the future.

Integrating with general tools may be a design goal. Yet it clearly isn't fully there. A filesystem based language does better without even trying.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#53

Post by martin-t »

bantunes wrote: post #50
martin-t wrote: post #30

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…

On your log you wrote, about the bugs you found, "no, i am not gonna bother reporting it, i am a user, not a TestCase" - Maybe that's why Pharo is so buggy?

If he wants to use our class as a typechecker, so be it, i am not gonna be part of it. (I briefly considered reporting them, but the HTTP-only login on their bug tracker turned me off)

Re: Pharo MOOC

#54

Post by keithnz »

evv wrote: post #17

Random off-topic feedback: the video is not correctly configured in Firefox (on MacOS). The pervasiveness of Chrome scares me sometimes.

works fine for me using firefox on windows

Re: Pharo MOOC

#55

Post by FractalLP »

JepZ wrote: post #33
CodeArtisan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I am well aware of that as I had my own trouble learning Smalltalk. Yet in hindsight I like the clean design of the language. 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 l…

The difficulty for me isn't the syntax, so much as not knowing how to use the tools. Examples are extreme like other niche languages. You get either hello world or writing a web server. I'd like to see someone build a YouTube channel with a lot of very small applications that show adding methods, classes,debugging, and deployment.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#57

Post by shawnz »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
btilly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ruby the language, fails quite short of Smalltalk full graphical experience.

Well, it's not an IDE, so it's not fair to compare it to Pharo which is trying to be both a runtime environment and an IDE. If anything, it's an advantage that Ruby allows you to make choices about the development environment you use.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#58

Post by ljw1001 »

I've used Pharo, and, way back, programmed professionally in Cincom (then ParkPlace), IBM VisualAge, and whatever the Windows version of Smalltalk was called was called (Visual Smalltalk?). Also tooled-around a bit in Squeak.

All three of the professional environments were very good. When Pharo kicked off, it was supposed to have been people building a free Smalltalk you could use to build real world software, as opposed to the research-oriented Squeak community. They didn't stick to that path, tho.

As another post described, Pharo is a mess, and it doesn't get more reliable from release to release. It's too bad. The idea that any Smalltalk environment today is state-of-the-art is just misguided. I would rather use Intellij IDEA any day.

Smalltalk is still a beautiful thing, tho.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#59

Post by FractalLP »

shawnz wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby the language, fails quite short of Smalltalk full graphical experience.

Well, it's not an IDE, so it's not fair to compare it to Pharo which is trying to be both a runtime environment and an IDE. If anything, it's an advantage that Ruby allows you to make choices about the development environment you use.

I think it's fair to compare the language+environment which is the only thing that practically matters. Smalltalk has a really nice IDE and fast VM. Ruby doesn't have a native IDE, but does well with things like Vim & Notepad++. Ruby has a lot more modules and Rails. I wouldn't consider Ruby to be very fast being one of the slowest popular languages out there.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#60

Post by billsix »

Smalltalk was the first language I loved. It was great to write, but I had difficulty understanding the structure of other's code. Even with that great integrated debugger, I couldn't figure out how Morphic actually worked.

These days for graphical programming, I prefer C with nuklear (https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear) over smalltalk.

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