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Pharo 4.0 Released

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Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#71

Post by kilon »

justbeast wrote: post #64
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pharo is too cool and too well designed for mainstream. And people wonder why the Smalltalk community has such a bad reputation.

Ugh, I agree with zak_mc_kracken. The Pharo community needs to knock it off, with that kind of arguments. (And I say that, being a part of that community). Pharo is NOT too cool and too well designed for the mainstream. :( It /is/ cool, and has a lot of good work put into it. But it still needs a lot more work (especially in documentation and tutorials) before it's really useable by people without extensive Smalltalk…

First that was my argument and my opinion as I stated several times already. Not an opinion of a whole community. Second I prefer to say things as they are instead of being humble.

I don't believe for example its good design to depend on C libraries so heavily especially for something as essential like GUI development . I know for at least one bug in GTK that took a year to get resolved on MacOS because most people were not interested in it. In Pharo bug fixing is a lot easier because the language is dynamic and live and it has plenty of powerful IDE tools to make your life easier find bugs and resolved them. Same process in C or C++ is a pain in the ass. Python community chose to heavily depend on third party C/C++ GUI APIs .

I completely agree about documentation and tutorials but that does not make Pharo any less cooler in my back or worse designed , its makes it partly undocumented. Which is one of downsides of using Pharo.

And this is not just about Pharo, take Common Lisp and compare it with Javascript, how one language has been designed and how another. Which one is most popular ? How many articles have been written about Javascript ugliness ? What about C++ and Java way of doing OOP ? Compare it with the way Smalltalk is doing OOP.

Good design have been proven again and again in the software world highly unpopular , because people prefer to buy features. You can be humble and you can be honest, but you cant be both. I chose to be honest.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#72

Post by fstephany »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #27
philippeback wrote: post #4

Yeah! Pharo, the 1500HP engine for livecoding.

Is anyone using a smalltalk for live coding? It seems like the toplap community [1] who claim to be the home of live coding, are mostly into LISPs. [1] http://toplap.org

Basically all Smalltalker do live coding. It's not live coding in the sense of building a scene or composing music tough.

The parent probably means live coding his app. If you do Ruby, think about creating your whole program in IRB. You can dump the memory anytime and reload the dump to continue from where you left.

Coding in IRB means that you have access to all the introspection and dynamic analysis while you're coding.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#73

Post by lispm »

kilon wrote: post #70
lispm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I just started Logic on my computer and it uses native windows and lots of native UI. There is a main window, preferences window, help window, keyboard window, colors window, metronom settings, ... there is a menu bar with ten menus - native. There are native open/save dialogs, ... None of that is in Pharo. It uses a clunky font, clunky windows, clunky shadows on windows, clunky resizing of the main window, its…

I have not been using Logic that much, but I can assure you Ableto and Reason are custom drawn GUI all the way and so are the vast majority of VST instruments and effects. Fonts that comes with Pharo by default is a bitmap font, you can replace it with any TrueType font in Pharo settings. You can have setting windows, open/save dialogs, color windows and much more with Pharo's GUI. There is even a window manager that…

> You can have setting windows, open/save dialogs, color windows and much more with Pharo's GUI.

That's not the point. It is just not used by the software itself.

> Personally I really like the GUI :)

I like the GUI of my Lisp Machine. But very very few people use it and it is behind the times in many ways.

> If you hate Pharo GUI so much

Pointing out that it is dated and clunky is not 'hating' it. If somebody asks me how a UI for development tool should look like, I would point out the importance of a native look and feel. Lighttable for example. A recent development. It's not really native. It uses complex web stuff on the desktop. Fail.

True, cross-platform development is tough. But it's somewhat possible. Example: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#74

Post by seanmcdirmid »

fstephany wrote: post #72
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone using a smalltalk for live coding? It seems like the toplap community [1] who claim to be the home of live coding, are mostly into LISPs. [1] http://toplap.org

Basically all Smalltalker do live coding. It's not live coding in the sense of building a scene or composing music tough. The parent probably means live coding his app. If you do Ruby, think about creating your whole program in IRB. You can dump the memory anytime and reload the dump to continue from where you left. Coding in IRB means that you have access to all the introspection and dynamic analysis while you're co…

The meaning of live coding is quite specific, I mean, there is toplap and even a whole conference on it coming up.

Gilad Bracha likes to push live programming in smalltalk via his newspeak work. No time travel though, which I don't think is supported by any smalltalk environment yet (you can change code via fix and continue, or objects via direct manipulation, but code changes do not update objects retroactively). So the Bret Victor style of live programming probably isn't supportable (without changes to be model/runtime).

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#75

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

kilon wrote: post #71
justbeast wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, I agree with zak_mc_kracken. The Pharo community needs to knock it off, with that kind of arguments. (And I say that, being a part of that community). Pharo is NOT too cool and too well designed for the mainstream. :( It /is/ cool, and has a lot of good work put into it. But it still needs a lot more work (especially in documentation and tutorials) before it's really useable by people without extensive Smalltalk…

First that was my argument and my opinion as I stated several times already. Not an opinion of a whole community. Second I prefer to say things as they are instead of being humble. I don't believe for example its good design to depend on C libraries so heavily especially for something as essential like GUI development . I know for at least one bug in GTK that took a year to get resolved on MacOS because most people w…

> You can be humble and you can be honest, but you cant be both

I... I literally have no words.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#76

Post by igouy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #74
fstephany wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically all Smalltalker do live coding. It's not live coding in the sense of building a scene or composing music tough. The parent probably means live coding his app. If you do Ruby, think about creating your whole program in IRB. You can dump the memory anytime and reload the dump to continue from where you left. Coding in IRB means that you have access to all the introspection and dynamic analysis while you're co…

The meaning of live coding is quite specific, I mean, there is toplap and even a whole conference on it coming up. Gilad Bracha likes to push live programming in smalltalk via his newspeak work. No time travel though, which I don't think is supported by any smalltalk environment yet (you can change code via fix and continue, or objects via direct manipulation, but code changes do not update objects retroactively). So…

>>but code changes do not update objects retroactivelyCan you explain what you mean by that?

iirc You can step back through the execution stack in the debugger, change code or variable values; and when you resume the new code is used and the new values are used.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#77

Post by CyberDildonics »

justbeast wrote: post #66
CyberDildonics wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also too cool to have a hello world that you can give to someone come in under 20 MB.

Nonsense. Hello world code in Pharo / Smalltalk is still a line or two, like in other languages. You're probably referring to the fact that there's an option to deploy the hello world PLUS the VM it runs on, in a single package. That's like saying "You can't give a Java hello world to someone under 50 MB". Yes, technically true, the couple of lines of Hello World source code don't work without a 50 MB JRE. But you're…

You can't give a Java hello world to someone under 50 MB.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#78

Post by zenlot »

kilon wrote: post #50
proksoup wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be great if there weren't so many red pills to choose from. Like calling it "the" red pill is overselling it I mean. It's "a" red pill.

As far as me is concerned to call something a red pill , it will have to offer a very diffirent experience. Thats is definetly not the case when it comes to coding, where you have the same old same recipe with some new things here and there. This is why also it took me so long to get used doing things in Pharo compared to learning another programming language which would be far faster. Pharo requires a rethinking of…

"You could argue that some language like Lisp requires the same, but the problem is that Lisp is just a language, Pharo is a lot more than that." - You could possibly try Racket.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#79

Post by lispm »

kilon wrote: post #50
proksoup wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be great if there weren't so many red pills to choose from. Like calling it "the" red pill is overselling it I mean. It's "a" red pill.

As far as me is concerned to call something a red pill , it will have to offer a very diffirent experience. Thats is definetly not the case when it comes to coding, where you have the same old same recipe with some new things here and there. This is why also it took me so long to get used doing things in Pharo compared to learning another programming language which would be far faster. Pharo requires a rethinking of…

> You could argue that some language like Lisp requires the same, but the problem is that Lisp is just a language, Pharo is a lot more than that.

Actually Lisp is so much more.

Lisp is a whole family of programming languages and its implementations. From Lisps on tiny micro-controllers, PCs, servers, to supercomputers. From simple interpreters to highly optimizing whole-program compilers.

Pharo is just one particular implementation of the programming language Smalltalk.

Re: Pharo 4.0 Released

#80

Post by vfclists »

reymus wrote: post #30
kilon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should not forget Pharo IS a fork of Squeak, it goes to a very different direction but is based on the same code. GUI wise Pharo inherited its GUI API, Morphic from Squeak. My personal opinions is that native look interfaces are dead. Nowdays most apps use custom look especially web applications. Native looks apps look boring. Users don't like boring applications. At least I dont :) The GUI in Pharo is not ideal b…

I disagree, native looking applications, while "boring", at least feel natural. Every time I use an application with custom controls (which almost always look pillowy) I feel like it wasn't made by a professional, it tends to respond different and it just doesn't feel right. I have read again and again criticism against Java and how it "failed" in the desktop because every time you used a Java application, it looked…

SmallTalk was designed to BE the computer. Skinning for a native look the way Qt does may be the way to go. Targeting code for native applications should really be a separate thing and should involve additional toolkits.

The commercial Smalltalks do this but they are very pricey.

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