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Pharo 9

pharo.org

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Re: Pharo 9

#181

Post by xkriva11 »

pjmlp wrote: post #107
asah wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

language developers consistently underestimate the importance of "Algol-like syntax" in allowing mainstream adoption.

Actually language developers consistently underestimate the importance of large corporations pushing languages no matter what developers think about them. Smalltalk lost the day IBM decided to join Sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge > VisualAge Micro Edition, which supports development of embedded Java applications and cross system development, is a reimplementation of the IDE in Java. This version of Visua…

some reading from that era: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/the_parcplace_digitalk_mer...

Re: Pharo 9

#182

Post by egeozcan »

xkriva11 wrote: post #173
egeozcan wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not talking about everything being an object. I was talking about that claim being the key to being nice and comfortable. Many sibling comments, IMHO, miss the point of the parent and focus on the claim about python and js. Python and js could perhaps have been completely object based. It still wouldn't make them comfortable for many.

The sentence says that it makes Pharo clean and comfortable to learn. Not that it makes every language clean and comfortable to learn :-)

Yes and the comment I replied to vaguely suggested that it didn't make python and js comfortable to learn and everyone focused on the fact that in these languages not everything is an object.

Re: Pharo 9

#183

Post by opan »

Zababa wrote: post #71
xkriva11 wrote: post #29

This is a long list of rare features that make Pharo interesting: https://pharo.org/features

I don't know if it's my eyesight declining but that postcard is hard to read. Wikipedia has a svg file with higher resolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pharo_syntax_postcard.svg

Well, the light gray on white background has horrible contrast. I think that'd give most people trouble.

Re: Pharo 9

#184

Post by blacklion »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #179
hota_mazi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java was an answer to C++, not to Smalltalk, which had already been dead for a while by the time Java started taking off.

It's more accurate to say it hadn't really come alive yet. But still as late as 96, 97, 98 you could still find job postings advertising for Smalltalk developers. I know, because early-20s me really wanted to do be doing that, but I wasn't qualified. Within a few years Smalltalk had vanished from the few industry pockets it had, and was replaced by Java in most cases.

Fun fact: I know one company in Russia which built aerospace-grade product in Smalltalk as late as 2010s. I don't know, maybe they still use it right now, maybe it had been replaced, all my friends in this company changed job in last 10 years.

Re: Pharo 9

#185

Post by dimal »

speed_spread wrote: post #83
a2800276 wrote: post #73

The page seems to be going out of it's way to not mention the word "Smalltalk". Does anyone have an idea why that is? Does Smalltalk have such a bad reputation nowadays or has someone trademarked the term?

Maybe Smalltalk sounds old like COBOL. It's hard to re-kindle interest in old tech in the eyes of new devs. It seems every generation of programmers want to have their "own" tools, even if they're worse than the previous ones.

I always had positive connotations of Smalltalk. Seemed it was talked about as if it was OOP “done right” before Java messed things up. That’s just me though.

Re: Pharo 9

#187

Post by nsm »

gavinray wrote: post #152

I've often heard two statements online from older programmers. "Delphi/TurboPascal was the peak of developer productivity" And "Smalltalk was the peak of developer productivity" I've only been programming about a decade so both of those languages were long before my time. Can anyone who has experience programming in Smalltalk share what was so special about it/what made it so productive to write programs in versus ot…

I wrote a post about this as someone who only discovered it in 2020 - https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/experiencing-smalltalk/

Re: Pharo 9

#188

Post by mcguire »

gavinray wrote: post #152

I've often heard two statements online from older programmers. "Delphi/TurboPascal was the peak of developer productivity" And "Smalltalk was the peak of developer productivity" I've only been programming about a decade so both of those languages were long before my time. Can anyone who has experience programming in Smalltalk share what was so special about it/what made it so productive to write programs in versus ot…

Speaking as someone who had experience programming in Smalltalk in its heyday, it had at least as many downsides as upsides and those who claim it was a peak are either looking at it through rose-tinted nostalgia or are Alan Kay.

One favorite advantage was that as much as possible of the system was written in itself and the development environment was an integral component. Any developer could see and change anything. The approach was that you took the Smalltalk system and built your application as an extension onto it. "Playground-VM" is a pretty good description.

Unwieldy? Not if you bought into it entirely, in roughly the same way that certain people I know bought into Emacs: Use it as your login shell and do everything through it. It was bad for creating stand-alone programs or scripts; instead, you add objects and methods to do whatever you wanted to do today.

Re: Pharo 9

#189

Post by vfclists »

a2800276 wrote: post #73

The page seems to be going out of it's way to not mention the word "Smalltalk". Does anyone have an idea why that is? Does Smalltalk have such a bad reputation nowadays or has someone trademarked the term?

It is mostly marketing bullshit.

Pharo IS Smalltalk in the same way Skoda is Volkswagen

Re: Pharo 9

#190

Post by igouy »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #170
varjag wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well $200 in 1980s is something like $500 today. I don't think I own any piece of software costing that much.

That seems like an ahistorical objection. $199 was a very reasonable price for a powerful dev tool in 1988. A lot of software at the time cost much, much more. Look up historical prices for just about any contemporaneous commercial software. You can still argue they would have done better in the long run by marketing themselves as "Turbo Smalltalk" at $69.99. But that's a different argument than "wow that's way overp…

"The list price is $150 each for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and for a bundle containing both Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger."

p8 October 1988 https://books.google.com/books?id=WSBVAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA18-PA8

Smalltalk/V 286 included source-code debugger, bit mapped WIMP for MS-DOS, BitBlt graphics, … Turbo Pascal + debugger already cost more.

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