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Pharo 11

pharo.org

31–40 of 189 posts

Re: Pharo 11

#31
I always feel like I should be doing more with Pharo. I love smalltalks and there's something really fun and playful about working with it, even those with a more "professional" shine on them like Pharo. I've been experimenting with Godot recently and I feel like there's a lot of that spirit in modern gamedev, where the tool is written in itself and gives you all of the same parts to play and build with.

I guess I don't really know what my usecase for Pharo is, like what niche is it filling? Maybe I need to build my next web...thing with it and see how it works out?

Re: Pharo 11

#32
My first time seeing Pharo. First impressions are that it reminds me strongly of Smalltalk with the single-source IDE and runtime.

Not a bad thing, just an observation.

Re: Pharo 11

#34

My first time seeing Pharo. First impressions are that it reminds me strongly of Smalltalk with the single-source IDE and runtime. Not a bad thing, just an observation.

"Pharo is an open source, cross-platform implementation of the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language and runtime."

So not surprising.

Re: Pharo 11

#35

My first time seeing Pharo. First impressions are that it reminds me strongly of Smalltalk with the single-source IDE and runtime. Not a bad thing, just an observation.

Aah, it's intentional. :)

> Pharo features

> A dynamic, pure object-oriented programming language in the tradition of Smalltalk

Re: Pharo 11

#36
Pharo looks like a blast from the past in a good way. It harkens back to the era when a lot of work was put into carefully designing language, IDE, and UI/UX environments cohesively with an eye toward using the computer to maximize human capability and productivity.

Then we dumped all that and abandoned it and moved to today's visually and ergonomically inconsistent hodge podge. It mostly happened because of the web but also because the velocity of the industry increased to the point that it felt like a waste of time to think deeply about anything. It'll just be obsolete next year. Slap it together, get it out the door, repeat.

Re: Pharo 11

#37

Can Pharo also store data in its language runtime (which is long-running if I understand right)? If so, does that make it its own type of database?

Yes, it is sometimes used as a database, and there is Gemstone [1] which brings it to another level.

[1] https://gemtalksystems.com/products/gs64/

Re: Pharo 11

#38

I always feel like I should be doing more with Pharo. I love smalltalks and there's something really fun and playful about working with it, even those with a more "professional" shine on them like Pharo. I've been experimenting with Godot recently and I feel like there's a lot of that spirit in modern gamedev, where the tool is written in itself and gives you all of the same parts to play and build with. I guess I do…

IMO it's a good tool for web scraping. The reason: you can do web scraping with Parasol (i.e. Selenium [1]) and then if you need visualization tools then you can immediately use Roassal [2]. The thing is: Pharo and the fact that it's more GUI-oriented than other programming languages, allows for data visualization a bit easier. Also: you don't need to know database specific. You can just store the data and save the image. Super useful for small web scraping projects.

Another use-case is: open-source software where you want to encourage users to just open up "the damn code engine" and hack straight into it, seeing it change on the fly. Like, can you just right click in Windows on a pixel and change the code that underlies it? In Pharo you can! Commercial parties would find this horrible, but it's amazing for full open-source software. Note: I don't think any other language is capable of this!

For web apps, B2B works quite well. B2C, I see scalability issues.

[1] https://github.com/SeasideSt/Parasol

[2] https://github.com/ObjectProfile/Roassal3

Re: Pharo 11

#39

I always feel like I should be doing more with Pharo. I love smalltalks and there's something really fun and playful about working with it, even those with a more "professional" shine on them like Pharo. I've been experimenting with Godot recently and I feel like there's a lot of that spirit in modern gamedev, where the tool is written in itself and gives you all of the same parts to play and build with. I guess I do…

What about trying the Godotalk [1]?

[1] https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/godotalk/

Re: Pharo 11

#40

The primary challenge with Pharo is the complexity of using this in a multi-user type of environment where the image is shared between people. How does one do that?

Pharo source management is based on Git, so the workflow is not special. We build the development images on the CI so every developer can download the already prepared image with the latest commits, but that is just for convenience.

Though there is the issue of: the changes in your image are not necessarily the changes in your local repository and the syncing of both can sometimes cause annoying issues. In most cases I've learned to work around it, but it wasn't plug and play straighforward.
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