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Pharo 12

pharo.org

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Re: Pharo 12

#81

Post by igouy »

twixfel wrote: post #78
igouy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to learn a whole new set of tools The tools are how we find functionality that can be re-used and re-purposed to do what we need. A lot of exploring and reading existing stuff, less writing new stuff. > Smalltalk files are not plain text but rather images (or something) Mostly Smalltalk files are plain text files! There's a plain text log file with a replayable record of what you've been doing. There's a sources fi…

That's fine, I understand that a lot of my criticisms are arguably actually advantages, but after doing the MOOC about 8 years ago I just couldn't stick with it. Fun though, and a great way to really learn OOP at the time when I was just starting out programming.

That's fine, people have some strange ideas about Smalltalk, both +ve & -ve.

Re: Pharo 12

#82

Post by alexisread »

twixfel wrote: post #19
anilakar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funnily enough, I'd compare the image and versioning differences to managing Postgres rather than non-image based languages.

Postgres has to deal with images (backups) and versions (migrations). Maybe selling image-based systems in both cases needs a little work or formalisation (best practices and all that)?

Image-based systems seem more about data management rather than code management. Just some random thoughts

Re: Pharo 12

#83

Post by em-bee »

azinman2 wrote: post #79
em-bee wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree. here is a screencast i made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38995507 i don't know how much has changed since then. but if pharo has changed so much that this screencast can no longer be used then that's a problem in itself. we are not going to gwt more screencasts if their halflife is to short.

Looking over the syntax, it seems that lines end with a period, much like in English. This makes much more sense than semicolon! That said, it looks like you end up with a million windows to do anything. Seems like the UI could be better UX'd, no? Guessing this a community that would treat such a comment as harassment.

why would it be considered harassment? it's not like your comment is any more critical than many of the others here.

as for the million windows, if you go that from my videos, then i'd like to point out that the interface has indeed improved since. for one it added the ability to group windows with tabs: https://youtu.be/GGJZeajjWGU?list=PLqbtQ7OkSta0ULYAd7Qdxof85...

(interestingly, that video is older than mine, so it seems that i just hadn't discovered this feature yet)

Re: Pharo 12

#84

Post by mifa201 »

I started a new job in Smalltalk one year ago without any previous experience with the language (background in Scheme, a bit of Common Lisp / Clojure, C, C++, Java, Python, Haskell and a couple of other languages). I had three pair programming sessions in the beginning and that was it, it took me one month to get a grasp of the codebase I have to maintain/develop further. The application is huge, but the tooling and discoverability of the programming environment (including best debugging experience I've ever seen) made it super easy to dive into the system and learn everything practically by myself. This and the fact that everything follows the same basic design principles (objects all the way down) make it a perfect match for solving complex problems.

Honestly my experience at work was mostly with Visualworks. But I've been using Pharo in two side projects and I'm loving it. It became one of my top 3 programming languages I've ever used (together with Scheme and CL). It's impressive how much this rather small community achieved, thanks for the awesome work and this new release!

Re: Pharo 12

#85

Post by igouy »

em-bee wrote: post #65
igouy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your applications would look however you wanted them look. https://pharo.org/success/

that's not the question. we are looking for examples that come with source that can be studied. the success page lists 53 projects. only one of them came with a direct link to the source. one included an un-clickable link. one linked to a non-english website where i could figure out that it was licensed under the LGPL, but i could not find the link to the source. a surprise was that DrGeo which is known to be Free So…

> i have actively explored working with pharo.

Then you must already know more than me, about what's available now.

Too much? https://github.com/feenkcom/gtoolkit

> … given the image based development you tend to start with a current version of pharo and then keep to that version until you are done.

I think of it as image based development: not image based version control.

Re: Pharo 12

#86

Post by whartung »

First, congrats to the Pharo team, I mean they do a lot of work.

But a singular testament of Pharo is that it this amazing environment, with all this heritage, tickling many of the more popular "CS folk" buttons.

It's an active, busy project, with lots of committers.

And yet, "nobody" uses it.

The Pharo folks live in their sandbox, eating their dog food, making Pharo more Pharo than ever, but it seems to only be uplifting folks making Pharo. Pharo is built for Pharo makers to make Pharo, and they continue make Pharo a better place for them to live and do their work.

I'm certainly not going say that its because of X or Y or Z. Just that, it "is". It is "not used" in the large. Sure, folks use it, they have their success stories like any project does to some extent. But the larger "hive mind" of the "internet" hasn't seemed to have caught on, or have tasted it and moved on to something else.

So, at 30,000 feet, despite all their work, something is not quite clicking.

Re: Pharo 12

#87

Post by kingspact »

wk_end wrote: post #69
kingspact wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Pharo because they changed it too radically from Squeak, which I DO like very much.

As a curious outsider - what are the key differences between Squeak and Pharo that make it worse in your eyes?

They removed a lot of the capabilities of Squeak and most of the nice legacy code included for educational and historical purposes, and neutered the object inspection tools. I understand that Pharo is no longer Squeak and the whole idea was to simply take Squeak and change not just the UI but the actual language. But I'm just a Squeak person.

Re: Pharo 12

#88

Post by lolinder »

whartung wrote: post #86

First, congrats to the Pharo team, I mean they do a lot of work. But a singular testament of Pharo is that it this amazing environment, with all this heritage, tickling many of the more popular "CS folk" buttons. It's an active, busy project, with lots of committers. And yet, "nobody" uses it. The Pharo folks live in their sandbox, eating their dog food, making Pharo more Pharo than ever, but it seems to only be upli…

> The Pharo folks live in their sandbox, eating their dog food, making Pharo more Pharo than ever, but it seems to only be uplifting folks making Pharo.

Some of this is just down to the philosophy of Smalltalks. To program in a Smalltalk is to make Smalltalk. You can't really separate the creation of the system from the creation of the application(s).

With that in mind, it's hardly surprising that few people who aren't contributing to Pharo use Pharo—it may not be just that it hasn't found mainstream appeal (which is true) but also that most people who pick it up and start using it seriously end up becoming contributors.

Re: Pharo 12

#89

Post by em-bee »

kingspact wrote: post #87
wk_end wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a curious outsider - what are the key differences between Squeak and Pharo that make it worse in your eyes?

They removed a lot of the capabilities of Squeak and most of the nice legacy code included for educational and historical purposes, and neutered the object inspection tools. I understand that Pharo is no longer Squeak and the whole idea was to simply take Squeak and change not just the UI but the actual language. But I'm just a Squeak person.

actually, from pharo's perspective the goal was to remove bloat, things that didn't help active new development. as a result pharo images were smaller, and didn't have to support lots of old legacy code or objects.

another problem that squeak had was that it was built on top of old images, containing objects that date back to the beginning of squeaks history, and possibly even older than that, and because of that it was (at least at the time) not possible to verify the ownership and license of all the source that the image was made of. for some objects the source was even lost altogether. this made squeak incompatible with FOSS licenses and it was a reason why it was not included in linux distributions. which is one factor that limited its spread among developers.

one of pharo's goals was to remove those old objects and unverified source and make it possible to build new images purely from a verifiable source.

from a certain perspective, the inclusion of those old objects creates a certain sense of awe, considering who were the people that worked on smalltalk that created these objects, whereas pharo in that respect feels more sterile.

Re: Pharo 12

#90

Post by em-bee »

igouy wrote: post #85
em-bee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not the question. we are looking for examples that come with source that can be studied. the success page lists 53 projects. only one of them came with a direct link to the source. one included an un-clickable link. one linked to a non-english website where i could figure out that it was licensed under the LGPL, but i could not find the link to the source. a surprise was that DrGeo which is known to be Free So…

> i have actively explored working with pharo. Then you must already know more than me, about what's available now. Too much? https://github.com/feenkcom/gtoolkit > … given the image based development you tend to start with a current version of pharo and then keep to that version until you are done. I think of it as image based development: not image based version control.

what do you mean by image based version control?

i mean the lack of version control inside the image can be considered a problem, as you have to connect to external tools go get it, lest you save a copy of the image as a version (which is what i would call image based version control), which that is not practical at all.

but that is not what i meant. i was talking about the problem that when i develop an application in pharo 11, but then i want to move the development to pharo 12, that amounts to a lot of work, so i don't do it but i'll stick to pharo 11 until my app is done.

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