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Pharo 7.0 released

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Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#181

Post by chaostheory »

crdrost wrote: post #162
diegoperini wrote: post #124

I lol'd when the quote, "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.", is accompanied with a relatively chaotic artwork of the development environment. Anyways, the dedication of the team is really remarkable. It looks like a really useful learning/teaching tool for OOP. I'll try and hopefully beat my prejudice.

I need to caution against using a Smalltalk dialect like Pharo to teach OOP. The essential problem is that Smalltalk does OOP "right" and what one sees called OOP in the broader community generally does not have that same ideological purity. In addition Smalltalks are a deeply different vision of programming. I don't think I've ever shown a programmer a Smalltalk and had them go "Oh yeah this all makes sense." I have…

So Pharo is a better version of Squeek?

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#183

Post by bitwize »

chaostheory wrote: post #181
crdrost wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to caution against using a Smalltalk dialect like Pharo to teach OOP. The essential problem is that Smalltalk does OOP "right" and what one sees called OOP in the broader community generally does not have that same ideological purity. In addition Smalltalks are a deeply different vision of programming. I don't think I've ever shown a programmer a Smalltalk and had them go "Oh yeah this all makes sense." I have…

So Pharo is a better version of Squeek?

Pharo is a fork of Squeak with different goals.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#185

Post by SomeHacker44 »

diegoperini wrote: post #124

I lol'd when the quote, "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.", is accompanied with a relatively chaotic artwork of the development environment. Anyways, the dedication of the team is really remarkable. It looks like a really useful learning/teaching tool for OOP. I'll try and hopefully beat my prejudice.

When I see "pure" I think "side-effect free" but I sure do not think that is their intention in using that term of art here. I am pretty sure they mean "pure object-oriented" to mean "impure language where everything is an object".

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#186

Post by SomeHacker44 »

jdmoreira wrote: post #139
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not looked at Pharo, but the Lisp development environment on my Symbolics computers is amazingly integrated, so this is a very high bar to surpass if true.

wait.. You have several Symbolics lisp machines? which ones?

Like lispm, I have several working MacIvory machines as well as several native Ivory machines and several working DEC Alphas running OpenGenera. I also have others including TI and Xerox but have not yet restored them.

You can, with a bit of effort, get OpenGenera running on a Linux VM and display on a modern X server. There are a few patches needed due to recent X server changes, or just run an Ubuntu from a dozen years ago on metal.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#187

Post by 4thaccount »

smoe wrote: post #155
4thaccount wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The main website could benefit from somehow conveying the mind blowing power of using Pharo. Maybe lots of little gifs?

One thing that struck me a bit odd was, that the website makes it look like I have to buy a book or join a (paid?) mooc to get started, because these are the very first sections under "documentation". I was just looking for a basic examples to get some sense what Pharo is about and what the look and feel are. Without downloading and installing it, I wasn't aware that there is a pretty nice interactive tutorial built…

I don't remember the MOOC costing money, but it was in French with English subtitles which is understandable with them being French researchers at INRIA, but it couldn't keep my attention up due to the gap.

The books are all free in PDF form and the lead developer also has another website somewhere where he hosts old Smalltalk textbooks which are largely still relevant.

They certainly could work on conveying this better, but it is open source and likely not a high priority.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#189

Post by claystu »

TLDR: Pharo needs mountains of high-quality documentation equal to Python's docs or Java's docs if it seriously hopes to attract server-side or desktop mindshare among developers.

Long Version:

In 1980, Smalltalk had some of the best documentation of any language out there. In 2019, it basically has none. By 2019 standards, Pharo 7 ships without any documentation at all. That's a game-stopper.

Pharo 7 looks really polished. It sounds like the design team put in tons of hard work over the past year and half to produce this release. Moreover, since it's smalltalk, Pharo is also probably very powerful for both web and desktop development. BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS IF DEVELOPERS CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE IT!!!

(pardon the all caps, but I want to emphasize my point)

Here is my message for the development team: if you really want developers to start building stuff with Pharo, then you absolutely must (1) write detailed, soup-to-nuts, high quality docs for web design and (2) write another set of detailed, soup-to-nuts, high quality docs for desktop GUI programming.

The Pharo book doesn't cut it--not even close. It's not a very good book. The Pharo MOOC doesn't cut it--again, not even close. Who wants to learn that way? ProfStef is just a fancy hello world; it's really not a tutorial and it doesn't lead anywhere.

I realize that what I'm saying comes across as pretty strong medicine, but please understand, that's because I actually think Pharo looks amazing and would like to use it.

In my opinion, you should stop development on Pharo and document what you've built instead. Write docs for a year. Today's release announcement states that the Pharo 7 team closed 2142 issues. Brag in 2020 about the fact that you wrote 2142 pages of documentation and tutorials over the past year. Make your documentation coverage as thorough as your testing coverage.

Imagine what might happen if Smalltalk 2020 was as thoroughly documented as Smalltalk 80.

Re: Pharo 7.0 released

#190

Post by amygdyl »

4thaccount wrote: post #108
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not looked at Pharo, but the Lisp development environment on my Symbolics computers is amazingly integrated, so this is a very high bar to surpass if true.

Running Pharo (or Cincom Smalltalk or Squeak Smalltalk) on an OS like Windows is similar in many ways to an old Symbolics machine, but Symbolics didn't need to sit on top of an OS, but was lisp all the way down. This existed in the past with Smalltalk as well at Xerox Park where it introduced the GUI and Mouse. I forget the machine's name, but someone on HN rebuilt one recently. The hardware was expensive at the time…

>Symbolics didn't need to sit >on top of an OS, but was lisp >all the way down

'twas Genera, no less.

However, your use of the company name is possibly more descriptive, because OpenGenera ran on Alphas running Tru64 UNIX, and sadly only Symbolics LISPms were truly the completely vertically integrated development machines of famous appeal.

But I don't see why it is not possible to be able to drop to the registers in a emulated host, just as we could in Genera.

I am uninformed here, but do any low level tools work as expected, as if on the metal, in emulated host environments?

*if I am ever driven to a warts and all autobiography, Spoiled By Abstraction, would at least be my working title.

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