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Pharo 7.0 released

pharo.org

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Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#31

Post by pjmlp »

thekingofh wrote: post #23
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I couldn't understand the fascination with the integrated environments though That's one of the key benefits: the environment is an object too. First class IDE knowledge about your objects (Smalltalk pioneered automatic refactorings etc), the ability to modify it as you like, hot code reload, re-startable apps, "live" images to send for debug, etc.

It feels like an alien world moving into the Smalltalk live environments and the patterns I've built up over the years and tools like Vim, etc are indispensable when it comes to moving around and modifying code. Of all the reading I've done on it, the entirety of the language is contained inside images. I know that the Pharo guys have engineered this marvel, and I think it's on the verge of a breakthrough with a lot…

Small pedatic correction, Xerox PARC guys have engineered this marvel for Lisp, Smalltalk and Mesa (later Mesa/Cedar).

This work was the genesis of IDEs.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#32

Post by DennisP »

klibertp wrote: post #28
thekingofh wrote: post #10

"Everything's an object" is object oriented programming done right and I can see why Ruby and other languages used those ideas from Smalltalk. I couldn't understand the fascination with the integrated environments though. It was my biggest stumbling block. Is there a pathway to use Pharo with my traditional tools?

You certainly can use Pharo with normal tools. You just write (and version, and whatever else) your code normally in files, then you "file in", or load, those in Pharo. You'd need ~3 lines of a wrapper if you don't want to do it manually. I share your concerns, actually - the truth is, the code editing part of Pharo is its least compelling feature and just cannot compare to my Emacs setup with years of tweaking behin…

Considering how many editors have Vim emulators now, it's a little surprising nobody's done it for smalltalk yet.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#33

Post by virtualized »

nudpiedo wrote: post #18

Where does the Pharo runtime run? To which platforms can I bring its solutions? are these standalone binaries or can I create libraries or code which play well with other languages and systems? Every time I look at a programming language, and at the HN it is every second day, I think about what kind of problems can it solve, and for what kind of platforms these compile/run their runtimes.. and surprisingly not many p…

I looked for any useful documentation for a few minutes and just gave up. I don't want to read a book. I don't want to watch a video. This is not my first programming language, thank you. I just want a "hello world" example to get an idea what I am actually dealing with. How do I run a "hello world" program from the command line? How can I deploy that to another machine that doesn't necessarily have a GUI?

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#34

Post by fstephany »

nudpiedo wrote: post #24
nudpiedo wrote: post #18

Where does the Pharo runtime run? To which platforms can I bring its solutions? are these standalone binaries or can I create libraries or code which play well with other languages and systems? Every time I look at a programming language, and at the HN it is every second day, I think about what kind of problems can it solve, and for what kind of platforms these compile/run their runtimes.. and surprisingly not many p…

Why the downvotes? is there anything wrong in my question? I read the webpage and the answer is nowhere (at least I could not find it), and looking at the docs is not so easy to find this information, it seems that I have to get deep in a chapter of a book or a video in order to find out whether this tool has anything to do with my work, tool or area at all. Does it compile to other platforms? Binary code, compile to…

Like Java, it runs on a VM. This VM works on the mainstream OS.

One of the peculiarity of Pharo (and Smalltalk) is that when you shutdown the system, you can persist the whole system on disk (called "the image"). Next time you open it, you start exactly where you left.

All the development tools are mixed with your code. There is no differences between the coding time and runtime (i.e., you code at runtime). If you are familiar with IRB in Ruby, imagine a GUI running in IRB.

This means that it is hard to see the limit between your code and Pharo's code. Pharo 7 seems to bring a bootstrap process where you can build images from scratch. This is an interesting evolution that will vastly improve the development/reproducability/deployment story.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#35

Post by pjmlp »

m_mueller wrote: post #21

Genuinely curious: Is there any industry usage going on for Pharo?

There is, if you consider it is a Smalltalk dialect.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/

https://gemtalksystems.com/

So you can learn Smalltalk with Pharo and then get into the big boys Smalltalk.

However expect the typical enterprise projects where Oracle DB licenses are footnotes on the overall budget.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#36

Post by d-mason »

thekingofh wrote: post #23
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I couldn't understand the fascination with the integrated environments though That's one of the key benefits: the environment is an object too. First class IDE knowledge about your objects (Smalltalk pioneered automatic refactorings etc), the ability to modify it as you like, hot code reload, re-startable apps, "live" images to send for debug, etc.

It feels like an alien world moving into the Smalltalk live environments and the patterns I've built up over the years and tools like Vim, etc are indispensable when it comes to moving around and modifying code. Of all the reading I've done on it, the entirety of the language is contained inside images. I know that the Pharo guys have engineered this marvel, and I think it's on the verge of a breakthrough with a lot…

It is an alien world.... but a better one by most measures.

I come from Emacs (20+ years when I first encountered the Smalltalk IDE), and find aspects of code editing irritating sometimes, but the overall value of the IDE more than pays for that irritation.

One of the coolest things is TDD carried to an extreme level. I build my test, and it fails because there's no such method, so I get a debug window and tell it to create the method... then I fill in the contents and click proceed... and picks up where it left off! It either works, or I'm back in a debug window fixing what failed. Total time from thinking of a test to working code, often less than 5-10 minutes.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#37

Post by sigzero »

snazz wrote: post #11
collyw wrote: post #7

First time I have heard of this. What does it offer that other languages don't? What are the downsides?

Pharo is the most actively developed and used Smalltalk environment. There’s plenty of evangelism and information on the Web about it in a similar way to Lisp. Pharo takes the “integrated” in IDE to a whole new level, which is one of its selling points. You can find plenty more information about how Smalltalk-style OOP is superior to Java-style OOP, so I won’t rehash that here.

> Pharo is the most actively developed and used Smalltalk environment.

Is that true? VisualWorks isn't used more places? Where are you getting that information from?

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#38

Post by lukego »

klibertp wrote: post #16

Detailed changelog: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-changelogs/blob/maste... Sounds incredible! Git integration and related code management changes are especially nice, 64-bit by default is great and support for binary packages is also important. New, extensible code browser (Calypso) also sounds impressive, but I'll have to see it in action first. Pharo is an incredibly productive environment. Fully inspectab…

GToolkit is also an exciting new development that's happening in parallel with the mainline Pharo. This is a reimagined programming workflow for Smalltalk with new UIs for coding, debugging, documenting, example browsing, testing, etc.

Likely the best bits of this environment will be cherry-picked into future Pharo releases, but meanwhile it is available here at https://gtoolkit.com/ and I for one am building an application on it.

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