21–30 of 116 posts
Weirdest programming language/IDE/Runtime/everything I've ever attempted learning. The sheer oddity + lack of real world example code floating around made it feel impenetrable. To put it into perspective, picking up Rust and writing entry level but real world applications was a walk in the park after coming to terms with the ownership system.
not sure if I understand you, but you have the code of the whole system at your fingertips. Which is certainly "real world" because you are running it :)
Weirdest programming language/IDE/Runtime/everything I've ever attempted learning. The sheer oddity + lack of real world example code floating around made it feel impenetrable. To put it into perspective, picking up Rust and writing entry level but real world applications was a walk in the park after coming to terms with the ownership system.
It's really one of those things that will die out on their own, because of the many layers and the little applicability (outside of playing the gimmicks).
Weirdest programming language/IDE/Runtime/everything I've ever attempted learning. The sheer oddity + lack of real world example code floating around made it feel impenetrable. To put it into perspective, picking up Rust and writing entry level but real world applications was a walk in the park after coming to terms with the ownership system.
> The sheer oddity + lack of real world example code floating around made it feel impenetrable not sure if I understand you, but you have the code of the whole system at your fingertips. Which is certainly "real world" because you are running it :)
Great idea but not pragmatic enough. I did try.
I don't know Pharo at all, but "not pragmatic" often means just "too different from what I'm used to"...
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No, but you can do concurrent programming in Pharo: https://books.pharo.org/booklet-ConcurrentProgramming/pdf/Co...
So the entire dev environment and any programs you have running in it only uses a single thread?
Weirdest programming language/IDE/Runtime/everything I've ever attempted learning. The sheer oddity + lack of real world example code floating around made it feel impenetrable. To put it into perspective, picking up Rust and writing entry level but real world applications was a walk in the park after coming to terms with the ownership system.
Learning Rust is at least an order of magnitude harder than learning Smalltalk. This is not to dismiss what you have said. On the contrary, it highlights what must be an enormous miss in how Pharo presents documentation on its landing page.
You have Smalltalk the language, which is this [] big, and Smalltalk the environment and class libraries, notably the GUI system, which is this [.....**.....] big.
And, sure, you have all of the source code, but, for me, the source code may as well be organized in a stack of index cards. You get the individual methods, but not the sweeping picture. I can learn a lot more scanning a file full or source code, compared to the little snippets of code you're presented with screen by screen. Just being able to scroll and absorb is useful.
But even then, especially being OO, with lots of abstraction, tracing through the GUI code, blind, is very difficult. You end up at top level, "do nothing" abstraction classes. Much like in Java, where everything you click on is an interface, which doesn't tell you a whole lot.
Navigating a Smalltalk image is a skill all its own.
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Syntax is the easy part. The real difficulty is in trying to make sense of the whole ecosystem, including the strange runtime-IDE-hybrid approach.
Yes last time I checked they had their own versioning system as well... it's one thing to learn a language but having to learn a whole new set of tools put me off in the end. I guess I can see the argument that the Smalltalk files are not plain text but rather images (or something), but having to basically download a second OS within the OS just to write Hello World was off putting. I realise that that's also can mak…
Using git with Pharo: https://books.pharo.org/booklet-ManageCode/pdf/2020-05-12-Ma...