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Pharo 8.0

pharo.org

21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Pharo 8.0

#21
post #2

Pharo always looks cute, but does anyone here use it, even for toy stuff?

I use it, mostly for toy stuff (work is 80% Java).

Once you get used to it, Smalltalk is really the most amazing development environment. It's hard to describe how it feels to work with live objects - it's an incredible speed boost, because instead of grepping logs or stepping through code, you just interact with the objects directly, you can examine the state of instance variables, add new methods, or change code while the code is running. The feedback loop is so short, you get amazing productivity.

There's a great video floating around somewhere of someone debugging an Asteroids game while the game is running.

From what I've read, the downside is that working on larger programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more communication to keep the code base consistent and structured.

Re: Pharo 8.0

#22
post #5

So, still no HiDPI/Retina support. This is probably the most requested feature since at least Pharo 4, and nobody seems to be interested in implementing it.

> This is probably the most requested feature since at least Pharo 4

I don't see any page where it says this is the most requested feature. If it was, it would've been developed by now.

It's kinda funny, few hours ago there was a post on the frontpage by burntsushi on the terrible way FOSS developers are treated. And here we have a live example of the usual drive-by commenters who take one glance at the project and decide their own niche requested feature is the most important one.

Re: Pharo 8.0

#23
post #2

Pharo always looks cute, but does anyone here use it, even for toy stuff?

I use it, mostly for toy stuff (work is 80% Java). Once you get used to it, Smalltalk is really the most amazing development environment. It's hard to describe how it feels to work with live objects - it's an incredible speed boost, because instead of grepping logs or stepping through code, you just interact with the objects directly, you can examine the state of instance variables, add new methods, or change code wh…

>From what I've read, the downside is that working on larger programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more communication to keep the code base consistent and structured.

I don't think that's an inherent limitation of image based development -- just that the current systems don't offer facilities for syncing etc.

Re: Pharo 8.0

#24
post #2

Pharo always looks cute, but does anyone here use it, even for toy stuff?

I once interviewed a candidate who decided to use Pharo to solve my technical problem. It was an absolute joy to see not only a good approach, but such an interesting and alien language employed to solve it.

He got the job. :)

Re: Pharo 8.0

#25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it, mostly for toy stuff (work is 80% Java). Once you get used to it, Smalltalk is really the most amazing development environment. It's hard to describe how it feels to work with live objects - it's an incredible speed boost, because instead of grepping logs or stepping through code, you just interact with the objects directly, you can examine the state of instance variables, add new methods, or change code wh…

> From what I've read, the downside is that working on larger programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more communication to keep the code base consistent and structured. I don't think that's an inherent limitation of image based development -- just that the current systems don't offer facilities for syncing etc.

Maybe grandpa already knows, but in Pharo's case, there is Iceberg. It's a Git interface that's included in default Pharo images that understands Pharo's packages, and so on. You can push your stuff to Github etc. and teams can work together that way.

I've never worked in a team in a Pharo projects, but I imagine it works well somehow. There's ~75 contributors to the 8.0 release.

Re: Pharo 8.0

#26
post #18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This page ( http://pharo.org/news/pharo8.0-released ) is currently offline. However, because the site uses Cloudflare's Always Online™ technology you can continue to surf a snapshot of the site. Except that I see a big error page. Isn't CloudFlare supposed to help with this? The message on top seems to indicate that, but when I (back in the day) tested with CF on my domain it just proxied every request and failed w…

It is optional to let CloudFlare cache the content. I believe you can control it from the CloudFlare control panel as well as affect it from your HTTP headers. So I bet they have the feature enabled on the panel but their HTTP headers tell CloudFlare not to cache the page, maybe accidentally.

It is caching the static assets (js, css, png, etc) based on default extensions[1]. The page itself is dynamic, likely for the comment feature at the bottom of the page. If they wanted to cache it, they could probably add some caching headers (have to change the responses on the origin) or a Page Rule in cloudflare (and not have to change anything on the server). But that won't be a good idea if people can login to the page to comment (not sure if CloudFlare can tell if someone is not-logged-in and return a cached version; that would be interesting). I see CF-Cache-Status: DYNAMIC header, which is:

"The resource content type was not cached by default and your current Cloudflare caching configuration doesn't instruct Cloudflare to cache the resource. Instead, the resource was requested from the origin web server. Use Page Rules to implement custom caching options."

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-U...

Re: Pharo 8.0

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is the most requested, then perhaps one of those requesting it should try to do it themselves? HiDPI support sounds like a high effort low reward task (according to this[0] HiDPI monitors practically do not exist in the wild and chances are none of the main developers have one), so unless someone who really wants it puts the effort themselves it may take a long time to appear. Generally speaking unless there is…

Every Macbook after around 2015 is HiDPI. Windows Surface laptops, too. Hardly "practically do not exist in the wild". I love Smalltalk, but I am not qualified to rewrite the entire Pharo rendering layer, unfortunately. Also, statscounter doesn't account for high resolution displays at all, grouping them all as "other". And these are around 20%.

Don't forget the Dell XPS line (which is popular with dev types). I am working on a three year old XPS 15 with HiDPI

Re: Pharo 8.0

#28
post #5

So, still no HiDPI/Retina support. This is probably the most requested feature since at least Pharo 4, and nobody seems to be interested in implementing it.

I'm on a retina mac, and it looks like this https://imgur.com/a/iSkHMlJ text rendering-wise. Maybe it's my middle age eyes, but it looks fine to me???

The Pharo window is significantly pixelated in comparison to the browser window on the left

Re: Pharo 8.0

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is the most requested, then perhaps one of those requesting it should try to do it themselves? HiDPI support sounds like a high effort low reward task (according to this[0] HiDPI monitors practically do not exist in the wild and chances are none of the main developers have one), so unless someone who really wants it puts the effort themselves it may take a long time to appear. Generally speaking unless there is…

Every Macbook after around 2015 is HiDPI. Windows Surface laptops, too. Hardly "practically do not exist in the wild". I love Smalltalk, but I am not qualified to rewrite the entire Pharo rendering layer, unfortunately. Also, statscounter doesn't account for high resolution displays at all, grouping them all as "other". And these are around 20%.

I'm curious if it is even more misleading. Does it count 3840x2160 with 2x scaling as "other" or "1920x1080"?

Re: Pharo 8.0

#30
post #9
post #2

Pharo always looks cute, but does anyone here use it, even for toy stuff?

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson I did some work in Smalltalk (working on a mod of Scratch 1.4, which was written in Squeak Smalltalk from the turn of the century). Once you got used to it, it was amazing. The environment is lively, and you can debug into everything. The tech is great; it is just that the community of people who know it is relatively small. If you want…

Seems fairly dead, the examples certainly don't work or are missing entirely.
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