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Pharo MOOC

mooc.pharo.org

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Re: Pharo MOOC

#61

Post by ekvintroj »

I see many comments talking about teaching objects with Pharo, we used to use it in the UNQ (a university in Argentina), now we use another Smalltalk flavour, because of the complexity of it. It's called CUIS, developed in Argentina too, the first days we use a framework that uses some similar to prototypes, so the students can start learning objects without the overhead of classes and inheritance. And then we switch to the classical class hierarchy way.

It's a nice tool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_e3_3MyTBY

Re: Pharo MOOC

#62

Post by FractalLP »

zerr wrote: post #45
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…

What about other Smalltalks? Some are used in industry, so probably should be more reliable.

From what I've gathered, Cincom is really good but very expensive.

There are a variety of proprietary language vendors with great products (Cincom Smalltalk, Dyalog APL, Wolfram language that is part of Mathematica), but it is a weird sale in the modern age. Why use a better tool if you have to pay for it and your entire business's IP is tied to another company pulling the strings. Even if they promise their tools are 10x more productive, is the risk acceptable?

Re: Pharo MOOC

#63

Post by rjblackman »

jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

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'd extend that by saying it teaches you what OO was meant to be.. It also shows you a lot of what is missing in modern environments. Imagine being able to run code and create any objects via a kind of command line and while any program is running be able to change it on the fly for experimentation/exploration purposes! I wish .net had something like this!

Re: Pharo MOOC

#64

Post by FractalLP »

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…

Thanks for putting this out there. I found some weird things as well when using it, but just figured it was me. I was hoping your notes were from 2014, but it looks like you just went through all this.

Another problem with Pharo is the confusion with Bloc, Morphic, and Spec. With C# you have WinForms and that is pretty simple and Java has Swing. With Pharo, I can't seem to find a decent way to build a GUI. Is Spec supposed to replace Morphic?

Re: Pharo MOOC

#65

Post by shawnz »

rjblackman wrote: post #63
jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

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'd extend that by saying it teaches you what OO was meant to be.. It also shows you a lot of what is missing in modern environments. Imagine being able to run code and create any objects via a kind of command line and while any program is running be able to change it on the fly for experimentation/exploration purposes! I wish .net had something like this!

VS does have that functionality, although it was only added in VS 2015:

https://johnkoerner.com/csharp/the-c-interactive-window-in-v...

Previously there was the Immediate window but it is limited:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f177hahy%28v=vs.110...

Re: Pharo MOOC

#66

Post by rjblackman »

shawnz wrote: post #65
rjblackman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd extend that by saying it teaches you what OO was meant to be.. It also shows you a lot of what is missing in modern environments. Imagine being able to run code and create any objects via a kind of command line and while any program is running be able to change it on the fly for experimentation/exploration purposes! I wish .net had something like this!

VS does have that functionality, although it was only added in VS 2015: https://johnkoerner.com/csharp/the-c-interactive-window-in-v... Previously there was the Immediate window but it is limited: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f177hahy%28v=vs.110...

unfortunately, it's not really the same as with proper message passing/late binding like in smalltalk.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#67

Post by JepZ »

FractalLP wrote: post #55
JepZ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know about Pharo, but I have seen very few IDEs which make it as easy as Smalltalk environments (e.g. VisualWorks) to do what you asked for as they provide you with GUI a for all that stuff. Pharo is probably no different.

I think the first important step, is to understand the different columns of the 'System Browser'. From a quick search that video playlist might help you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xF4fnGaE2w&list=PLqbtQ7OkSt...

Re: Pharo MOOC

#68

Post by lukego »

I chose Pharo for a project recently (http://github.com/studio/studio/). I am enjoying using it in production. The Glamorous Toolkit framework (Inspector and Spotter) is saving me a huge amount of work.

I see Pharo as two universes: the stable (now Pharo 6) and the development (now Pharo 7.) I work on the stable one and I don't concern myself at all with what is happening on the development one. The yearly release cycle of development-to-stable feels about right to me.

I have had to spend some time working out how to fit Pharo into my wider project build system, and how to store Smalltalk source code on Github as part of a larger repository such that you can handle merges etc. This made me curse a lot. It worked out fine in the end though.

I have been working on this for one year now and I haven't had problems with Pharo bugs or instability.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#69

Post by nstricevic »

ljw1001 wrote: post #58

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 opp…

> As another post described, Pharo is a mess, and it doesn't get more reliable from release to release.

Can you share this post, please?

Re: Pharo MOOC

#70

Post by philippeback »

I have been using Pharo since its 1.x releases and deployed commercial solutions using it.

Very stable. Quite powerful.

And it was/is a pleasure to work work with it.

One has to invest time and effort to master it. I would say that this is best suited to people who actually know what they are doing. Syntax is easy but frameworks are very advanced. So, do not go there without support.

I see comments that are not that kind to Pharo. I do to care to be honest. I do not think that Pharo is for the masses.

It has imperfections but nothing is at the core. And things are moving forward very well.

As a Pharo consortium member I vote with cash and usage.

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