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Pharo 12

pharo.org

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Re: Pharo 12

#31

Post by peatmoss »

no_time wrote: post #7

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.

Squeak / Pharo are alternate timeline technologies. Maybe the one where Betamax won and Al Gore read the intelligence briefing.

Their lineage goes back to the Alto when people were imagining what interacting with computers even meant, and what metaphors from the real world make sense to apply to collections of bytes.

Rust is radical in some ways, but it's fundamentally a creature of the vaguely Unixy paradigm we all live in today. I miss the weird world of possibilities we used to have.

Re: Pharo 12

#32

Post by cess11 »

no_time wrote: post #7

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.

Others have linked to the book collection, there you'll find walkthroughs of the basics, building web applications, tracking code in git, and so on. A lot of the common packages also have examples bundled that you can play around with and read documentation in.

Once one gets over the initial hurdle of the syntax, message passing and how to use the GUI to create new projects and objects one can usually just surf around in the image and look for examples to figure things out.

Re: Pharo 12

#33

Post by selykg »

0x445442 wrote: post #13
no_time wrote: post #7

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.

I don't think that's necessarily what the OP is saying. I agree with OP.

Finding documentation to learn to use this absolutely obscure system is near impossible. I seen an announcement about a Pharo release a couple years ago and was like "huh, that sounds cool." Proceded to download it and had no clue about anything. It is not at all like any other IDE.

Learning it might not be hard, but when the IDE is absolutely different from anything else you've ever used, combined with very little documentation that speaks to how to do the basics, it can be a very mysterious and difficult thing.

Rust is like any other programming language, in that you write code in a file, then compile it. Yes, there's other stuff to deal with in between and it can get way more complicated. But the IDE is the real culprit, combined with documentation for a developer to learn to develop real applications with, that makes Pharo infinitely more difficult in my personal opinion.

I guess to simplify this a little with an edit. If you already know another programming language, learning Rust is not fundamentally different. Some parts of it will be difficult like the borrow system and stuff that's very Rust centric. But in most ways it behaves like a lot of other languages in terms of using it at a bare bones basic level. Pharo is ... otherworldly in that nothing else really compares, you have to learn a completely different paradigm for how to program it, and that is the difficult part imo.

Re: Pharo 12

#34

Post by charlysl »

peatmoss wrote: post #31
no_time wrote: post #7

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.

Squeak / Pharo are alternate timeline technologies. Maybe the one where Betamax won and Al Gore read the intelligence briefing. Their lineage goes back to the Alto when people were imagining what interacting with computers even meant, and what metaphors from the real world make sense to apply to collections of bytes. Rust is radical in some ways, but it's fundamentally a creature of the vaguely Unixy paradigm we all…

> Al Gore read the intelligence briefing.

Wasn't that George W. Bush?

Re: Pharo 12

#35

Post by cess11 »

whartung wrote: post #29
0x445442 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rust the language is certainly more difficult than the Smalltalk language. The language isn't the issue. 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 met…

When I realised there was a difference between inspecting a class and an instance it became much easier to find the things I was looking for.

Re: Pharo 12

#36

Post by nsm »

melvinroest wrote: post #17
no_time wrote: post #7

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.

I agree with you. I've worked for a while at a company using it in production [1]. For learning Pharo (while not working at a company), I've learned that going to ESUG [1] and Pharo Days [2] (2 conferences) is the best way to actually learn. On ESUG there are many professional Smalltalkers, including people that write Pharo. And on Pharo Days there are many OG Pharo devs. They can teach you certain things much quicke…

I think Pharo would benefit a lot from having lots and lots of screen casts, since so much stuff is visual. I don't think something like ESUG is a sustainable way to spread techniques. A lot of stuff that is well documented in the Pharo ecosystem is old. A lot of the new stuff doesn't have great docs. Just reference docs and code is not enough. There has to be a coherent narrative around an API to put it together.

Also, I'm all onboard having a UI environment for programming, but it needs to have great keybindings that follow platform HIGs, and at least my Pharo 10 experience of the window management was really bad.

I wrote about this some https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/experiencing-smalltalk/

Re: Pharo 12

#37

Post by cess11 »

charlysl wrote: post #34
peatmoss wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Squeak / Pharo are alternate timeline technologies. Maybe the one where Betamax won and Al Gore read the intelligence briefing. Their lineage goes back to the Alto when people were imagining what interacting with computers even meant, and what metaphors from the real world make sense to apply to collections of bytes. Rust is radical in some ways, but it's fundamentally a creature of the vaguely Unixy paradigm we all…

> Al Gore read the intelligence briefing. Wasn't that George W. Bush?

Not in the alternate timeline.

Re: Pharo 12

#39

Post by packetlost »

andsoitis wrote: post #27
ginko wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the entire dev environment and any programs you have running in it only uses a single thread?

Pharo uses green threads https://www.pharo.org/features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_thread

So does it use symmetric multiprocessing at all?

Re: Pharo 12

#40

Post by ginko »

andsoitis wrote: post #27
ginko wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the entire dev environment and any programs you have running in it only uses a single thread?

Pharo uses green threads https://www.pharo.org/features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_thread

That feels very limiting. It's one thing to have a program run only on one core, but you're supposed to have your entire dev environment, including editor and debugger inside the VM. Won't that end up with the env freezing on compute heavy tasks?
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