Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pharo 9

pharo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 232 posts

Re: Pharo 9

#171

Post by blihp »

xkriva11 wrote: post #29

This is a long list of rare features that make Pharo interesting: https://pharo.org/features

Nothing rare about most of these features as they came from Squeak. What's really rare is how slimy they're being in at least implying most of these features are unique to Pharo in their marketing of it. There is not a single mention of Squeak or Smalltalk, which their project is derived from[1], on the page. It's unfortunate as they have put a lot of effort in expanding on the previous work and created a nice UI to make the environment more productive and accessible which they can legitimately take credit for.

[1] I don't mean 'inspired by', they literally started off with a fork of the code of both the VM and image. This is perfectly legit per the license, but it's hardly a completely original work.

Re: Pharo 9

#172

Post by TrevorJ »

moron4hire wrote: post #113
chazu wrote: post #53

This is really exciting - congratulations to the team and all the contributors. For those who already know "what smalltalk is all about" but are looking to get into Pharo and get something done, I recommend Pharo by Example and Deep into Pharo - between those two books, any developer should be able to figure out the workflows Pharo expects you to employ to be productive. My only advice would be to go in without preco…

> My only advice would be to go in without preconceived notions based on your years of using other languages. And the community is super helpful. Honestly, if more people went into every language with that mindset, there'd be a lot less bickering and problem a lot more getting done in the world.

It's a tall order. My observation with people with mastery, who switch to a new tool, is that usually: A- something external has forced the change, in which case it's hard for them to be patient/charitable. or B- they like their current tool, but have some ultra specific complaints that they hope the new tool will address whilst leaving the rest intact.

Basically, the common circumstances around these things leads to some biases.

I think one way to address this, is to simply be aware of ourselves. Another would be to ensure people use a large variety of tools early on in their education/career. The meta-skill of navigating to a new tool is something we get better at with practice.

Re: Pharo 9

#173

Post by xkriva11 »

egeozcan wrote: post #167
goatlover wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike most OOP languages, it's true, and not just marketing, for Smalltalk to make the claim that everything is in an object.

I was not talking about everything being an object. I was talking about that claim being the key to being nice and comfortable. Many sibling comments, IMHO, miss the point of the parent and focus on the claim about python and js. Python and js could perhaps have been completely object based. It still wouldn't make them comfortable for many.

The sentence says that it makes Pharo clean and comfortable to learn. Not that it makes every language clean and comfortable to learn :-)

Re: Pharo 9

#174

Post by gavinray »

Qem wrote: post #158
gavinray wrote: post #152

I've often heard two statements online from older programmers. "Delphi/TurboPascal was the peak of developer productivity" And "Smalltalk was the peak of developer productivity" I've only been programming about a decade so both of those languages were long before my time. Can anyone who has experience programming in Smalltalk share what was so special about it/what made it so productive to write programs in versus ot…

It's better shown than told. Just see this: 7 minutes of Pharo Smalltalk for Rubyists - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o

I watched the whole video, thank you for sharing!

The bit towards the end (around 5 min mark I believe) where he gives the IDE (is that what you call it?) an input + desired output and asks it what message would produce the result he wants is pretty damn cool.

The rest of it is "interesting" I suppose. I can imagine that, at the time, this sort of interactive/live visual environment was revolutionary. This would be 1972-1990's I think, and during those early years there was nothing even remotely similar, right?

Towards the end Rapid Application Development (RAD) IDE's would start taking hold and then came the Pascal-powered heydays for a bit.

I think that maybe just due to familiarity bias, I still prefer a text-based IDE which has hot-reloading and live eval results.

Something pretty neat I use personally is an extension called "Quokka" which places the results of each line next to them, live as you edit (similar to a REPL)

https://quokkajs.com/

Jetbrains IDE's have a similar thing with "Worksheets" for languages like Kotlin, Python, Scala, and likely a few others. (Also "Metals" extension in VS Code can do this for Scala incredibly well)

Re: Pharo 9

#175

Post by pjmlp »

ketralnis wrote: post #168
pjmlp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like C, born in 1972?

Sure. How many new devs do you see writing C?

How do you think UNIX clones, GNU utilities and IoT devices are kept up to date?

Re: Pharo 9

#177

Post by pjmlp »

FpUser wrote: post #140
pjmlp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was already out of favour in the early 80's, hence C.A.Hoare turing award speech against it in 1980, but then UNIX took over the world anyway, and the FOSS wave with GNU Manifesto helped to take it further. Apparently people don't have any issue hanging to an OS about the same age as COBOL.

>"Apparently people don't have any issue hanging to an OS about the same age as COBOL." Why should they? It works for many cases and has mountains of apps, tooling, libraries, hardware support and whatnot. It takes decades for the new OS/ecosystem to mature.

Same conclusion can be applied to COBOL applications.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...

Re: Pharo 9

#178

Post by xfer »

publicola1990 wrote: post #136

Can it build GUIs? What about 2d/ 3d graphics? Does it interface with Java things? Databases?

It's a single threaded vm like python/nodejs with ffi support. So you can expect same things i.e. ipc/network to communicate with outside.

Re: Pharo 9

#179

Post by cmrdporcupine »

hota_mazi wrote: post #159
pjmlp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Java :(

Java was an answer to C++, not to Smalltalk, which had already been dead for a while by the time Java started taking off.

It's more accurate to say it hadn't really come alive yet.

But still as late as 96, 97, 98 you could still find job postings advertising for Smalltalk developers. I know, because early-20s me really wanted to do be doing that, but I wasn't qualified.

Within a few years Smalltalk had vanished from the few industry pockets it had, and was replaced by Java in most cases.

Re: Pharo 9

#180

Post by goatlover »

egeozcan wrote: post #167
goatlover wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike most OOP languages, it's true, and not just marketing, for Smalltalk to make the claim that everything is in an object.

I was not talking about everything being an object. I was talking about that claim being the key to being nice and comfortable. Many sibling comments, IMHO, miss the point of the parent and focus on the claim about python and js. Python and js could perhaps have been completely object based. It still wouldn't make them comfortable for many.

True, but personally I think JS and Python would have benefitted from being more consistent about being object based. JS in particular, since it's prototypal, but has function constructors and class syntax, along with other things added over time that make the language more complex.
Post reply on HN