Pharo 7.0 released

Quantel Harry was the competition.

Link below, is for the 1981 Quantel Paintbox, the existence of which is responsible for the direction of my juvenile mind.

I should love to one day get together with like minded folk and assemble a complete ca. '89 broadcast graphics suite. I'm in advertising (London, independent, founder) and I'm not convinced that I couldn't work out the financial arithmetic favourably. I am persuaded by artist friends of the merit, tempered I expect by the reality of the working interfaces, if they actually used a 80s Quantel - we take instantaneous responsiveness for granted.. Time and place required, but I'm serious enough to have scouted premises and allocated budget.

I digress. Sorry.

I only have read about Pharo in the last couple of weeks, but I am taken by the sophistication of the ambitions and delivery thereof. I say this here, rather thanon a Pharo list, because I am unsure of what skills and specialities are required, but I have a professional itch to scratch, which is estimating the work of supporting a new language to the fullest extent possible, in Visual Studio. If this could be accomplished in under half a man year for a senior developer, I really want to know. (result to be released to community, purpose of exercise purely personal curiosity about what consequent effect is possible)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox

For me it was just the initial perception I got. E.g. I only realized that the books were free after you told me. And yes, this is due to me evidently being too lazy doing an additional click. I don't mind paying for books, but not as a first step.

I did download and tried Pharo because I was intrigued by it from another person, if I just were to land on the website from some random link, I likely wouldn't have.

I think there could be some small changes in wording and presentation that would get a long way for people without any prior knowledge of the language. For example if you compare it to Rust (just content, not design wise)

https://www.rust-lang.org/learn

My OS and all of its rules, tools and configuration, the UNIX philosophy, the POSIX standard, all of its history and convention: _that_ is my dev environment and it's as LIVE as anything can be.

Not some one-off unicorn IDE - no matter how awesome it is, sorry guys.

My entire toolchain in all of its diversity is one big living ecosystem. That is not, as you eloquently hinted at, a bunch of refined steam engines. It is maglev-level awesomeness. Some pointy-clicky IDE where you can inspect objects with trivial properties is not impressive. It was in the 90s, but now now. Ironically Pharo itself, to me, evokes the admittedly beautiful image of a bunch of refined steam engines. A beautiful thing of the past. Impressive, but obsolete - not unlike France itself.

You have to interact with dozens of systems for even the simplest applications now. Databases, HTTP APIs, knowledge systems, OS'es, all kinds of IoT and machinery, all of which have their own standards, their own philosophies, their own tools, their own way of doing things. None of this would ever work if one tool decides it has the Truth and all other should conform to it. Without the UNIX philosophy none of this would even get off the ground. Because that is wat Pharo is, a tool, _inside_ an already living ecosystem. That is exactly why you get programmers asking, why can't I use my tools, why can't I use the "shell", do this do that.. This tool does not fit the UNIX mindset: it's just another tool, but it pretends to be an entire ecosystem that handles everything. An OS inside an OS. This does not make sense to anyone (but the Smalltalk people apparently). Also, as an aside, that is exactly why emacs sucks (take that HN!!).

For some reason some people think programming is hard because you have to create some classes and struggle with basic syntax. Inspecting trivial object and deciding the value of its sole attribute is "2" or "A" is not what makes our work hard.

And yes, UI _is_ a crutch. Only visual tasks need visual interfaces, think Photoshop. Visual UIs slow you down, that's just a physical fact - how fast is you hand? - and it is totally reasonable for new/incompetent users and/or users that perform visual tasks, but programming is not a visual task. Programmers think in abstractions, in symbols. GUIs have their place to be sure, without autocomplete I would be useless, so there's that, but beyond that, nope, useless crutch for incompetent users. Take that, society.

~Angry Engineer

So the UNIX philosophy was the only possible way computing could have gone to result in a diverse set of systems that communicate with each other? Is there some sort of CS proof of this claim? Or was it just how history played out?

> For some reason some people think programming is hard because you have to create some classes and struggle with basic syntax. Inspecting trivial object and deciding the value of its sole attribute is "2" or "A" is not what makes our work hard.

Alan Kay and some others have thought programming would be more productive if it took place at a higher level than manipulating text and files. You might not agree with that, but the reason you have such good tools for text and file manipulation is because the Unix way prevailed. Magnitudes more effort has been poured into making that tooling than alternative approaches.

> Visual UIs slow you down, that's just a physical fact - how fast is you hand? - and it is totally reasonable for new/incompetent users and/or users that perform visual tasks, but programming is not a visual task.

Well, ask someone with a lot of VB or Smalltalk experience how much the environment slows them down in comparison. Because you often hear the opposite.

> GUIs have their place to be sure, without autocomplete I would be useless, so there's that, but beyond that, nope, useless crutch for incompetent users

I guess debuggers, refactoring and class browsers aren't useful, then.

> Impressive, but obsolete - not unlike France itself.

LOL, wat?