Pharo 4.0 Released

Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.

Yeah!

Pharo, the 1500HP engine for livecoding.

The changelog is here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-changelogs/blob/maste...

Things that I find especially interesting, from new stuff:

> TxModel, a modern text model who works with Athens (Preview)

This is very, very nice. New text model was in the works for quite some time now and I'm glad it finally landed. Easy and powerful text editing is important, even in primarily GUI-driven environments. Pharo was a bit behind the times in this regard, which resulted in, for example, Shampoo (http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/).

> OSWindow, a new way to handle windows and input events (Preview)

This allows for creating OS level windows from inside Pharo. IIRC it's supported only on Windows right now, but it's a very nice feature and will make creating apps that "look natively" easier.

> Slots model instance variables as first class enities and enable meta-programming on this level.

This looks rather important and I remember reading about it some time ago. There's a paper about it: http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Verw11bFlexibleObjectLayo... - I'll need to read it again now that it's implemented.

Then there are updated things, all very nice too. Congratulations to the team and contributors!

Did the compiler overhaul happen in this version?

So does iTunes on windows and Qt (since v. 4) on everything.

But I agree the single-window MDI is a major drawback. I keep checking out Pharo periodically and hoping a UI with multiple, native windows will be present or at least in the works, but sadly that is not yet the case.

There was actually a project many years ago for Squeak to give it native OS windows called Cheese, and the Squeak people, if you can believe this, actually told the author (Boris Shingarov) not to bother, and that if he wanted native windows, he should go use some other Smalltalk instead. They actually preferred their ugly, unprofessional, cartoonish UI that nearly everyone new to Squeak complained about.

I think Pharo is on the right track, but it's sad the developers have to spend so much time paying off the technical debt the Squeak project ran up.