I wonder, how hard is it to bootstrap Pharo on new platform...
Pharo 9
101–110 of 232 posts
Re: Pharo 9
#102Are there any perceived shortcomings of Smalltalk that caused it not to take hold?
Re: Pharo 9
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
C never really fell out of favor, though. And it's also the only available choice apart from assembler in many circumstances. But trying to revive interest in Ada, D, Sather, Prolog, etc would be a lot more difficult.
Smalltalk never really got substantial adoption...
Thanks Java :(
Re: Pharo 9
#104This is a long list of rare features that make Pharo interesting: https://pharo.org/features
AFAICT the big benefit of Pharo is on-the-fly introspection and the tooling to support dynamic introspection.
quick q: I can see the benefit for creating developer tools like the IDE and maybe for creating domain specific languages (DSLs)... but what "regular" applications benefit from this?
in particular, I can see (widespread use of...) introspection making it difficult for a developer of one large Pharo codebase to understand and maintain a different Pharo codebase...
also, Python has (arguably) "good enough" introspection and DSL support and mindshare/marketshare of millions of developers. When is python not good enough?
(asking innocently - please don't shoot)
Re: Pharo 9
#105Re: Pharo 9
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed that as well - it's a bit strange given that Pharo is a fork of Squeak, which does proclaim its ST origins on its front page. I wouldn't say Smalltalk has a bad rep nowadays, but it used to be knocked for being too expensive (the cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke), too slow, and producing nasty-looking non-native GUIs. These have almost all been fixed.
It has basically two reasons. First, it is to prevent conflicts like: "Pharo is Smalltalk, look, it is written on its web page! How do dare you to change this? You are allowed to improve this if and only if all the other Smalltalk implementations do that too!" [exaggerating]. Pharo has many differences from standard Smalltalk (different File API, class definitions, traits, slots, small grammar changes...). The second…
Interesting, thank you. It still seems weird to me, though. I feel Smalltalk is mostly mentioned with positive connotations (as opposed to, say Cobol) and would guess more people have heard of Smalltalk than Pharo and it would help orientation. So I was assuming something nefarious :)
Is there an overview of the differences somewhere?
Re: Pharo 9
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks Java :(
language developers consistently underestimate the importance of "Algol-like syntax" in allowing mainstream adoption.
Actually language developers consistently underestimate the importance of large corporations pushing languages no matter what developers think about them.
Smalltalk lost the day IBM decided to join Sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge
> VisualAge Micro Edition, which supports development of embedded Java applications and cross system development, is a reimplementation of the IDE in Java. This version of VisualAge morphed into the Eclipse Framework.
Re: Pharo 9
#108The page seems to be going out of it's way to not mention the word "Smalltalk". Does anyone have an idea why that is? Does Smalltalk have such a bad reputation nowadays or has someone trademarked the term?
Pharo considers itself to be Smalltalk-inspired.
Maybe the most succinct explanation of what this means comes from their vision document[1]:
> What we want to say is that if there is something that can be improved but does not conform the ANSI Smalltalk, we will do it anyway.
This really does seem to be a fundamental value within the Pharo community, and it distinguishes them from the rest of the Smalltalk community. When observing the communities around Squeak or the commercial Smalltalks, I often get the impression that they view themselves as a sort of Jedi order that's trying to preserve an older, better tradition amidst a decadent modern world. The Pharo community, by contrast, actively acknowledges that Smalltalk was not perfect, and is working hard to improve many things about it, including some of the fundamentals. For example, Pharo's made active steps to make their platform more amenable to source control, and, by extension, collaboration among larger groups of people.
[1]: https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/30434/PharoVision.p...
Re: Pharo 9
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
it doesn't yet support the whole IDE (because it has some other complications, we will solve in next release), but it supports application development with it.
Cool. How does it work, is it 100% native widgets? Are there any platform specific (x11 etc.) things used?
it works everywhere gtk3 works (we have production applications in windows, macOS and obviously linux)
Re: Pharo 9
#110>In Pharo, everything is an object. This purity and uniformity in the system and language design makes Pharo clean and comfortable to learn. Does this mean Python and JS meet the same definition and are as "clean and comfortable"?
When Pharo says 'everything' they mean _everything_.