Pharo 2.0 Released

Smalltalk is a great language/environment. I think the killer app for it right now is html5 games. You can program the server back end in pharo smalltalk, and the client frontend in amber smalltalk. On both ends, you get full interactivity, ability to inspect and change state, and the ability to debug and modify the code in real-time without any code/compile/run cycle.

Pharo has quite a decent set of command-line tools at hand for a Smalltalk (see also http://pharobooks.gforge.inria.fr/PharoByExampleTwo-Eng/late...). As for FFI we're about to fully integrate NativeBoost into the system which already provides decent FFI interaction on all X86 platforms: https://code.google.com/p/nativeboost/. The VM we use features a JIT, albeit not highly elaborate, it gives decent speedups. Besides that there is some research of mine going on, on how to implement the JIT native code generate at language side, which would give us the Smalltalk-level control over that piece.

As someone with essentially no experience with Smalltalk, let me offer some criticism. (It's constructive criticism, I promise :)

I'm a CS student taking a programming languages course, and for our term project we need to learn a new programming language, write a small project in the language and write a paper on its implementation, features, strengths, weaknesses, etc. After reading about an awful lot of languages, I thought Smalltalk would be an interesting choice, at least on the implementation side, given its relatively unique image-based system, not to mention having a graphical component, essentially an IDE, at the core of the environment.

Since Pharo seemed like the most popular choice, I decided to give it a shot. I was excited to get started, so I figured I could download the "one-click" for version 1.4 and get started right away. After extracting the zip and being given a .app folder, I thought I had mistakenly downloaded the Mac version. Nope, the website clearly says "For OS X, Linux, and Windows". Right off the bat this shows that Mac is probably the "first-class citizen", and it definitely doesn't show that the developers know how to properly distribute their software for multiple platforms (whether or not it's true, that's what it looks like). Since my platform of choice is Linux, and having seen the half-hearted attempts at supporting Linux from so many vendors so many times in the past, I started to get a bad feeling.

I found the README, whose only information is to run the .sh file included. I ran it and was given the helpful message that the "Contents/Linux/pharo" file was missing. Finding that hard to believe, I navigated to where that file was supposed to be located and, sure enough, there it was. After doing some detective work, I found the reason for my missing file message was due to the pharo binary being built for 32-bit systems. NOWHERE on Pharo's home page or download page is this apparent. No warning is given to the new, unsuspecting, 64-bit-OS-having user.

If anyone involved with the Pharo project is reading this, please understand that this is unacceptable. In 2013, if some software is built for 32-bit OS's only, the user should not only be warned before they decide to download the software, but something less cryptic than a misleading "file not found" error when trying to run the software would be helpful. I guess I can't say for sure, but to me this looks like almost no effort was put into helping new users get started.

Still somewhat determined to get this thing running, I installed an incredible amount of 32-bit libraries. Still no luck. I got to the point where a "could not find module vm-display-X11" is displayed. The file does exist, it's just another case of the 32-bit library blues. I installed some additional X11 32-bit compatibility libraries, but still had no luck.

Unable to justify wasting more time getting this thing working, I just gave up. I really wanted to spend some time with Pharo, but I guess the developers don't care about newcomers who don't already know the in's and out's of the system. I'm sorry, but if you want any sort of Smalltalk comeback that I've been reading so much about, this is absolutely NOT the way to do it.

Yep I can only agree with you, and there is some communication issue for the matter of the image/vm downloads.

Some measures have been taken especially if you run from the commandline use the zeroconf scripts from http://files.pharo.org/scripts. However still some issue remain that are currently not nice!

- no full 64bit support (will be addressed but with a 32bit image format this isn't that straight forward) - missing warning to install 32bit libs under linux (workaround on the way) - proper packaging (rpm / deb) which installs the dependencies is missing (also, there are some attempts there) - you have to explicitly tell the VM to run headless or not (I honestly don't know why! :D)

All in all you caught us, we mostly develop on mac, however our test infrastructure is running on linux hence imperatively Pharo has to run under linux. Yet there is some need for proper explanations, installation requirements!

Agreed, it also it has significant industry usage.