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Pharo MOOC

mooc.pharo.org

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Re: Pharo MOOC

#41

Post by crististm »

martin-t wrote: post #30

I had the "pleasure" of attending an OOP course at uni taught by Stéphane Ducasse. I didn't learn much OOP but i learned that pharo is an utter piece of garbage. The IDE randomly crashes, corrupts images (all your work is in the persistent image) and randomly ignores clicks making it insanely frustrating to use. Git integration is "WIP" which means it sometimes silently deletes files or you just don't get it to work…

The entry log from 2017-12-27 is appalling: one true namespace to rule them all and wreak havoc!

Re: Pharo MOOC

#42

Post by hota_mazi »

jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming

Smalltalk teaches no OOP that cannot be learned by more modern languages, starting with Ruby (which is already pretty old itself). And at least, these other languages don't impose on you broken IDE's that crash all the time and corrupt your work.

I find little point in learning Smalltalk today, except maybe read a ten minute article to check out its odd syntax.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#43

Post by [deleted] »

JepZ wrote: post #33
CodeArtisan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language itself is simple[1] but the environment and tools aren't. Smalltalk is a world in itself which is both its strength and weakness. https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/smalltalk/

I am well aware of that as I had my own trouble learning Smalltalk. Yet in hindsight I like the clean design of the language. Nevertheless, I find the argument on their website kinda odd and a bit confusing. I mean, I see a lot of Smalltalk advocates claiming the language is so simple to learn and at the same time I see a lot of programmers having trouble learning it. Maybe it is just wrong to call it 'very easy to l…

[deleted]

Re: Pharo MOOC

#44

Post by e12e »

dunham wrote: post #18
monocasa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people I've heard of using Smalltalk at all other than in dogfood situations are people using Gemstone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemstone_(database)

Way back in the day, "DabbleDB" was written in Smalltalk. (It was a Zenkit/Airtable type web app.) If I remember right, they had a separate image per customer and it took a moment to bring up the VM if hadn't been to the site in a while.

Sadly they got acqu-hired by twitter - and judging by some (not bad, just in lack of enthusiasm) comments, I got a sense that they sold dabbledb at peak technical/architectural debt...

It's a bit sad, I appeared to be a Google sheets meets office 365 flows on steroids before either was any good:

https://youtu.be/6wZmYMWKLkY

(i think that's from 2006 or so, archive.org has more info, but it's a bit painful to navigate on mobile)

Avi Bryant comments on hn from time to time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant

As I understand it, each customer got an image/vm - and data was just stored as Smalltalk objects. It'd been interesting to see where they might have gone if they coupled the dabbledb front end with gemstone/s.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#45

Post by zerr »

martin-t wrote: post #30

I had the "pleasure" of attending an OOP course at uni taught by Stéphane Ducasse. I didn't learn much OOP but i learned that pharo is an utter piece of garbage. The IDE randomly crashes, corrupts images (all your work is in the persistent image) and randomly ignores clicks making it insanely frustrating to use. Git integration is "WIP" which means it sometimes silently deletes files or you just don't get it to work…

What about other Smalltalks? Some are used in industry, so probably should be more reliable.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#47

Post by pjmlp »

btilly wrote: post #32
jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming

I agree that it is a language worth understanding. However the OO model of Ruby is identical. Without the drawbacks of being an image based language. So I'd suggest learning that instead. For those who don't know what I am talking about, there are several families of languages where the state of your program is kept within an image. The upside of this is that you can integrate everything together in a really neat way…

Ruby the language, fails quite short of Smalltalk full graphical experience.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#48

Post by pjmlp »

hota_mazi wrote: post #42
jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming

Smalltalk teaches no OOP that cannot be learned by more modern languages, starting with Ruby (which is already pretty old itself). And at least, these other languages don't impose on you broken IDE's that crash all the time and corrupt your work. I find little point in learning Smalltalk today, except maybe read a ten minute article to check out its odd syntax.

Ruby the language still doesn't have the development experience of 90's Smalltalk environments, not even JIT compilers that work half as fast as Smalltalk ones.

Re: Pharo MOOC

#49

Post by [deleted] »

crististm wrote: post #41
martin-t wrote: post #30

I had the "pleasure" of attending an OOP course at uni taught by Stéphane Ducasse. I didn't learn much OOP but i learned that pharo is an utter piece of garbage. The IDE randomly crashes, corrupts images (all your work is in the persistent image) and randomly ignores clicks making it insanely frustrating to use. Git integration is "WIP" which means it sometimes silently deletes files or you just don't get it to work…

The entry log from 2017-12-27 is appalling: one true namespace to rule them all and wreak havoc!

[deleted]

Re: Pharo MOOC

#50

Post by bantunes »

martin-t wrote: post #30

I had the "pleasure" of attending an OOP course at uni taught by Stéphane Ducasse. I didn't learn much OOP but i learned that pharo is an utter piece of garbage. The IDE randomly crashes, corrupts images (all your work is in the persistent image) and randomly ignores clicks making it insanely frustrating to use. Git integration is "WIP" which means it sometimes silently deletes files or you just don't get it to work…

On your log you wrote, about the bugs you found, "no, i am not gonna bother reporting it, i am a user, not a TestCase" - Maybe that's why Pharo is so buggy?
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