Every time I try a Smalltalk (++) implementation, the custom UI framework is what kills it for me. Not only are they completely non-native in look and feel, but they also lag behind on features - e.g. Pharo is apparently non-high-DPI aware on Windows.
Pharo 7.0 released
161–170 of 236 posts
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#162I lol'd when the quote, "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.", is accompanied with a relatively chaotic artwork of the development environment. Anyways, the dedication of the team is really remarkable. It looks like a really useful learning/teaching tool for OOP. I'll try and hopefully beat my prejudice.
I need to caution against using a Smalltalk dialect like Pharo to teach OOP.
The essential problem is that Smalltalk does OOP "right" and what one sees called OOP in the broader community generally does not have that same ideological purity. In addition Smalltalks are a deeply different vision of programming. I don't think I've ever shown a programmer a Smalltalk and had them go "Oh yeah this all makes sense." I have to preface it...
"This is a different vision of programming than you are used to, go ahead and run the executable."
"Um, it opened a desktop?"
"Yeah. So this is the program you are writing."
"What is?"
"This blank canvas."
"Oh, this is a text editor?"
"No, like, the program is running live right now."
"Well can I shut it down and edit it?"
"You edit it while it's still running. Here, go ahead and right click something..."
There's invariably some form of disbelief: surely we wouldn't have made this whole programming thing hard for no reason, so surely this approach to "everything is alive and you are mutating the ecosystem" is impossible for the simple reason that it is not ubiquitous.
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#163Looks interesting. Getting a weird error when installing it via Homebrew, though: "“Pharo6.1-64” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash."
Anyone experience anything similar?
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a Smalltalk environment A Smalltalk implementation. > So starting from those kinds of questions is missing the point… The questions `virtualized` asked are simple and clear. Telling `virtualized` that they are missing the point — instead of answering their questions — makes the community seem arrogant.
> Telling `virtualized` that they are missing the point — instead of answering their questions — makes the community seem arrogant. However, virtualized stated that they gave up after five minutes because they couldn't find a hello world example similar to programming languages they're presumably familiar with, because they didn't want to watch a video or read a book. So explaining that the Smalltalk environment is d…
> … it doesn't make a lot of sense for Pharo's website to advertise with a command line example…
Pharo's website does attempt to "advertise with a command line example" — and then fails to show that the example works.
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I couldn't understand the fascination with the integrated environments though. The only thing I can recommend it watching some Alan Kay videos or Pharo demos. Windows and Linux UI conditioned everyone to think of UI as a crutch for incompetent users, rather than a tool useful in its own right. This cannot be undone in a single reply, no matter how elaborate it will be. Traditional tools are definitely more polished…
Any good Pharo demos that you can recommend?
Depends on how much you know about SmallTalk. Here is a good one:
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> maybe it should try to sell itself, at least a little, for the uninitiated? Guessing this is a hard problem. People have been working on marketing Smalltalk for almost 50 years now. If there were an easy solution I reckon they'd have found it by now :)
This seems a step worse, though. Neither the release page nor the main Pharo page even mention smalltalk, yet the documentation page talks about it as if it's the same thing (and only seems to point to books and videos, not basic introductions and tutorials). It's really strange for a programming language site to go to so much effort to hide its language.
Yes, I see that the announcement says that the FFI is improved, so I look at the documentation page to see how it is improved, and I see quite a few links, but these are mostly old links to contributed docs, none obviously covering the new release. I guess that the books page linked to documentation page is the one most likely to include anything about the FFI, but the newest book I spot there is 8 months old. Google search for pharo 7.0 FFI turns up the same release announcement and nothing else relevant.
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the home page, in the A glimpse of Pharo section: $ curl https://get.pharo.org | bash $ ./pharo Pharo.image eval "42 factorial"
Which apparently does nothing.
I got 1405006117752879898543142606244511569936384000000000 on my command line after running those commands.
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Was about to say that myself. How many programmers (especially Linux ones) use vim?
Out of the emulations I’ve seen, JetBrains one is perhaps the closest to real vim (albeit not without a few weird corners). If Pharo is so flexible and modular, wouldn’t it be quite easy to add official support for vim mode?
// I’m honestly baffled at why people who code for living often do not use vim keybindings for coding, but that’s a separate story
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#169Every time I try a Smalltalk (++) implementation, the custom UI framework is what kills it for me. Not only are they completely non-native in look and feel, but they also lag behind on features - e.g. Pharo is apparently non-high-DPI aware on Windows.
Plus the lack of vim mode.
Re: Pharo 7.0 released
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I couldn't understand the fascination with the integrated environments though. The only thing I can recommend it watching some Alan Kay videos or Pharo demos. Windows and Linux UI conditioned everyone to think of UI as a crutch for incompetent users, rather than a tool useful in its own right. This cannot be undone in a single reply, no matter how elaborate it will be. Traditional tools are definitely more polished…
Any good Pharo demos that you can recommend?
There is a ProfStef object that you can send a message to (can't remember the message, maybe "go") which runs through a decent tutorial. After that I'd download one of the books and start going through that. I'm only a novice (have read maybe 1/2 of a book and played around in the IDE a bit). Pharo is really cool, but my programming needs are scientific in nature where I need something closer to Julia where there is a lot of builtin support for numerical work. Someone did write a numerical methods book in Pharo which was neat, but it is still lacking the libraries I need.