7 ms·

Pharo 5.0 Released

128 points by ch_123 10y ago

NhanH 10y ago
For anyone interested, there is a MOOC for Pharo going on here right now : https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/ https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/ . The video are in French with English subtitle, but all the contents are in dual language French/English.
- hathym 10y ago
  thank you for the link
mparramon 10y ago
Why is there no mention of Smalltalk on the page?
- lallysingh 10y ago
  So is it Smalltalk? I kept reading and thinking, "This smells like Smalltalk." That's certainly not a bad thing!
  - rjblackman 10y ago
    yes it's smalltalk, i believe it was a fork of squeak??
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    Maybe to them it is. Smalltalk has been around forever. We've all heard about it, but very few of us have done anything with it so maybe to too many it has been relegated to the "that's cool, but I'll probably never use it" bin.
- sigzero 10y ago
  You know that interesting. I never really noticed that before because I already knew it was for Smalltalk programming. You have to go to the "About" page to see that is has to do with Smalltalk. I sent them an email about that. It may be intentional but I would think you would want that somewhere more prominent.
- gecko 10y ago
  The main reason is because, while Pharo is obviously heavily inspired by (and, in fact, a fork of) Smalltalk, it's not trying to stay Smalltalk-80 compatible. Think of Racket: Racket started life as DrScheme, but as the goals of Racket gradually drifted away from being "just" a Scheme dialect, they decided to just call the entire language Racket to avoid confusion. Pharo's doing the same thing. For the moment, the changes are relatively minor--new GUI hierarchy, support for method lambdas, some cleanup of the class hierarchy, support for traits alongside classes, and so on--but the team wants the flexibility to break compatibility more thoroughly as time goes on. In other words, it's not about Pharo not wanting to give credit where it's due, but rather about not setting false expectations.
armitron 10y ago
It's great to see Pharo improving, it has tremendous potential. I think the groundbreaking changes in terms of immediate appeal will come in Pharo 6 (new widgets Brick/Bloc, faster graphics with SDL, better font rendering and so on) which will surely attract lots of newcomers to the environment. To any Pharo devs that may be reading this, there is this snippet in http://www.pharo.org http://www.pharo.org : $ curl get.pharo.org | bash In an age where nation states are fighting for control and MITM attacks are more prevalent than one would think, it does you no favors to promote snippets like the one I pasted. Please consider what the implications are and come up with a better way. I also noticed that you offer no signatures for the Pharo archives or downloads over HTTPS even. You do not need the bad publicity that will come with a security disaster stemming from these issues.
- sigzero 10y ago
  I hope you are right. I plan on doing the next MOOC that comes out to familiarize myself with Smalltalk and Pharo. Never stop learning.
  - soapdog 10y ago
    There is a MOOC going on on Pharo programming right now at FUN (France Université Numerique) https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/about https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/about It is awesome!
- chinathrow 10y ago
  They also could secure their downloads with TLS and signing.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    That would just give a false sense of security. In the end, you DO download a binary. Whether you download it with a script or not doesn't matter. And at least the script, you can examine before running.
- frou_dh 10y ago
biftek 10y ago
I'm curious, what do people use Smalltalk/Pharo for? I've seen a handful of demos and been blown away (especially the debugging tools), but am I wrong in assuming it's mostly for educational purposes? Is there a "real world smalltalk" that I'm missing?
- zeveb 10y ago
  It's useful in education, but it also was competitive in what became the Java market. Weirdly, the world bought into a relatively static language when it had the option to go for the extremely dynamic and flexible SmallTalk instead. I have always thought it an extreme shame that the man-centuries (man-millennia?) sunk into improving the JVM weren't instead spent improving an open-source SmallTalk instead.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    Is that because Java is more a traditional "source code in files, run a compiler" culture, where you can scale teams just by getting better at source control? For a long time, Smalltalk and its brethren were terrible at sharing code; you had a bunch of stuff in an environment, and importing and exporting stuff was a nightmare. Has this changed? Also, it's probably a lot harder to scale a Smalltalk app out to a server farm than it is to just rsync a bunch of java packages and hit "run". I'd be happy to be wrong about any of this. Smalltalk is my favorite language (that I'll never ship a product in) . . . but when you look at a couple of my recent projects, which are PHP + JavaScript + WebGL that interpret and let you look at a bunch of back-end statistics, I'd sure like to be using something better.
    - vanderZwan 10y ago
      Regarding your last comment: surely there's a good compiles-to-JS option available these days? There's even a Smalltalk for client-side programming: http://amber-lang.net/index.html http://amber-lang.net/index.html ... not sure how that would work with WebGL though.
      - 10y ago
marcus_holmes 10y ago
piping to bash as an install method? didn't we decide this was a really really bad idea?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aeze 10y ago
  It could definitely be dangerous, but nothing is stopping you from inspecting the script before you run it.
  - dguaraglia 10y ago
    Not saying you are wrong (you are not, you technically can download the script in one step, read it and then feed the local copy to bash) but someone posted a proof of concept a couple months ago that used user agent sniffing to potentially fool people into reading one thing and running another if they used the browser to read the source but curl to pipe the script into bash.
    - aeze 10y ago
      I wasn't aware of that, thanks.
protomyth 10y ago
gotta love a project that takes its documentation seriously http://files.pharo.org/books/ http://files.pharo.org/books/
plinkplonk 10y ago
Does anyone know if the compiler refactoring happened in this release?
- kilon 10y ago
  there is a new compiler this release and a new vm. Over 200 new features over 2000 fixed bugs and a ton of new documentation (my department). Busy Busy :)
  - plinkplonk 10y ago
    awesome! I always wanted to dig into squeak/pharo compiler implementation. The old code was a mess. Thanks, happy digging-into-code-time ahead.
krylon 10y ago
Smalltalk has been incredibly frustrating in that is one of the most fun languages ever, but makes it incredibly hard to actually produce a standalone program. Programming in Smalltalk environments compared to regular ones is like gardening, maybe, growing stuff organically as opposed to working in a factory. But I somehow never managed to rip an appplication out of its environment.
- thornkin 10y ago
  That was my frustration. I made a game in SmallTalk at one point but there was no way to distribute it to people without giving them my whole image. I just wanted a simple .exe to hand out.
  - incepted 10y ago
    I'm surprised that decades after the first Smalltalks came out, the Smalltalk people still have not understood how big a deal that is.
    - astrobe_ 10y ago
      http://forum.world.st/Create-a-exe-application-in-Pharo-2-0-td4719112.html http://forum.world.st/Create-a-exe-application-in-Pharo-2-0-... PS: You should be a bit more flexible. If you insist on programming, say, in Haskell the same way you program in C, all you'll do is hurt yourself. Same goes when you try to use an image-based environment like a standard IDE or toolchain. Just look at how Pharo itself is distributed: it's a zip file you can uncompress and run right on your desktop. On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer.
      - incepted 10y ago
        > On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer. You say this as if it's a good thing, it's not. It's a bad thing on Windows. It means the software will not be able to use a lot of facilities on the Windows platform. It's also a hassle for users who need to pick up a target directory, remember it's there, create a shortcut manually, etc... There are reasons why modern operating systems use installers As for the article, it is incredibly dated and wrong on many fronts about how people ship software on Windows. I'll just address one point: > Unfortunately is not a very flexible way to package anything into a single compiled executable. It is hard to ship an update - since you have to redeploy the executable anytime your program changes. Installing and updating executables on Windows is a solved problem. Solved. It's so easy to deploy patches and even have software self update that nobody thinks about it any more. The fact that Pharo is reinventing its own process under the cover of doing it better (which they don't, it's worse by all standards) is precisely the problem that I was referring to: Pharo (and Smalltalk people in general) still don't understand how to deploy software on modern computers.

128 points by ch_123 10y ago

NhanH 10y ago

For anyone interested, there is a MOOC for Pharo going on here right now : https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/ https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/ . The video are in French with English subtitle, but all the contents are in dual language French/English.

hathym 10y ago
thank you for the link

mparramon 10y ago

Why is there no mention of Smalltalk on the page?

lallysingh 10y ago
So is it Smalltalk? I kept reading and thinking, "This smells like Smalltalk." That's certainly not a bad thing!
- rjblackman 10y ago
  yes it's smalltalk, i believe it was a fork of squeak??
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Maybe to them it is. Smalltalk has been around forever. We've all heard about it, but very few of us have done anything with it so maybe to too many it has been relegated to the "that's cool, but I'll probably never use it" bin.
sigzero 10y ago
You know that interesting. I never really noticed that before because I already knew it was for Smalltalk programming. You have to go to the "About" page to see that is has to do with Smalltalk. I sent them an email about that. It may be intentional but I would think you would want that somewhere more prominent.
gecko 10y ago
The main reason is because, while Pharo is obviously heavily inspired by (and, in fact, a fork of) Smalltalk, it's not trying to stay Smalltalk-80 compatible. Think of Racket: Racket started life as DrScheme, but as the goals of Racket gradually drifted away from being "just" a Scheme dialect, they decided to just call the entire language Racket to avoid confusion. Pharo's doing the same thing. For the moment, the changes are relatively minor--new GUI hierarchy, support for method lambdas, some cleanup of the class hierarchy, support for traits alongside classes, and so on--but the team wants the flexibility to break compatibility more thoroughly as time goes on. In other words, it's not about Pharo not wanting to give credit where it's due, but rather about not setting false expectations.

armitron 10y ago

It's great to see Pharo improving, it has tremendous potential. I think the groundbreaking changes in terms of immediate appeal will come in Pharo 6 (new widgets Brick/Bloc, faster graphics with SDL, better font rendering and so on) which will surely attract lots of newcomers to the environment. To any Pharo devs that may be reading this, there is this snippet in http://www.pharo.org http://www.pharo.org : $ curl get.pharo.org | bash In an age where nation states are fighting for control and MITM attacks are more prevalent than one would think, it does you no favors to promote snippets like the one I pasted. Please consider what the implications are and come up with a better way. I also noticed that you offer no signatures for the Pharo archives or downloads over HTTPS even. You do not need the bad publicity that will come with a security disaster stemming from these issues.

sigzero 10y ago
I hope you are right. I plan on doing the next MOOC that comes out to familiarize myself with Smalltalk and Pharo. Never stop learning.
- soapdog 10y ago
  There is a MOOC going on on Pharo programming right now at FUN (France Université Numerique) https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/about https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/about It is awesome!
chinathrow 10y ago
They also could secure their downloads with TLS and signing.
- coldtea 10y ago
  That would just give a false sense of security. In the end, you DO download a binary. Whether you download it with a script or not doesn't matter. And at least the script, you can examine before running.
frou_dh 10y ago

biftek 10y ago

I'm curious, what do people use Smalltalk/Pharo for? I've seen a handful of demos and been blown away (especially the debugging tools), but am I wrong in assuming it's mostly for educational purposes? Is there a "real world smalltalk" that I'm missing?

zeveb 10y ago
It's useful in education, but it also was competitive in what became the Java market. Weirdly, the world bought into a relatively static language when it had the option to go for the extremely dynamic and flexible SmallTalk instead. I have always thought it an extreme shame that the man-centuries (man-millennia?) sunk into improving the JVM weren't instead spent improving an open-source SmallTalk instead.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Is that because Java is more a traditional "source code in files, run a compiler" culture, where you can scale teams just by getting better at source control? For a long time, Smalltalk and its brethren were terrible at sharing code; you had a bunch of stuff in an environment, and importing and exporting stuff was a nightmare. Has this changed? Also, it's probably a lot harder to scale a Smalltalk app out to a server farm than it is to just rsync a bunch of java packages and hit "run". I'd be happy to be wrong about any of this. Smalltalk is my favorite language (that I'll never ship a product in) . . . but when you look at a couple of my recent projects, which are PHP + JavaScript + WebGL that interpret and let you look at a bunch of back-end statistics, I'd sure like to be using something better.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Regarding your last comment: surely there's a good compiles-to-JS option available these days? There's even a Smalltalk for client-side programming: http://amber-lang.net/index.html http://amber-lang.net/index.html ... not sure how that would work with WebGL though.
    - 10y ago

marcus_holmes 10y ago

piping to bash as an install method? didn't we decide this was a really really bad idea?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aeze 10y ago
It could definitely be dangerous, but nothing is stopping you from inspecting the script before you run it.
- dguaraglia 10y ago
  Not saying you are wrong (you are not, you technically can download the script in one step, read it and then feed the local copy to bash) but someone posted a proof of concept a couple months ago that used user agent sniffing to potentially fool people into reading one thing and running another if they used the browser to read the source but curl to pipe the script into bash.
  - aeze 10y ago
    I wasn't aware of that, thanks.

protomyth 10y ago

gotta love a project that takes its documentation seriously http://files.pharo.org/books/ http://files.pharo.org/books/

plinkplonk 10y ago

Does anyone know if the compiler refactoring happened in this release?

kilon 10y ago
there is a new compiler this release and a new vm. Over 200 new features over 2000 fixed bugs and a ton of new documentation (my department). Busy Busy :)
- plinkplonk 10y ago
  awesome! I always wanted to dig into squeak/pharo compiler implementation. The old code was a mess. Thanks, happy digging-into-code-time ahead.

krylon 10y ago

Smalltalk has been incredibly frustrating in that is one of the most fun languages ever, but makes it incredibly hard to actually produce a standalone program. Programming in Smalltalk environments compared to regular ones is like gardening, maybe, growing stuff organically as opposed to working in a factory. But I somehow never managed to rip an appplication out of its environment.

thornkin 10y ago
That was my frustration. I made a game in SmallTalk at one point but there was no way to distribute it to people without giving them my whole image. I just wanted a simple .exe to hand out.
- incepted 10y ago
  I'm surprised that decades after the first Smalltalks came out, the Smalltalk people still have not understood how big a deal that is.
  - astrobe_ 10y ago
    http://forum.world.st/Create-a-exe-application-in-Pharo-2-0-td4719112.html http://forum.world.st/Create-a-exe-application-in-Pharo-2-0-... PS: You should be a bit more flexible. If you insist on programming, say, in Haskell the same way you program in C, all you'll do is hurt yourself. Same goes when you try to use an image-based environment like a standard IDE or toolchain. Just look at how Pharo itself is distributed: it's a zip file you can uncompress and run right on your desktop. On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer.
    - incepted 10y ago
      > On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer. You say this as if it's a good thing, it's not. It's a bad thing on Windows. It means the software will not be able to use a lot of facilities on the Windows platform. It's also a hassle for users who need to pick up a target directory, remember it's there, create a shortcut manually, etc... There are reasons why modern operating systems use installers As for the article, it is incredibly dated and wrong on many fronts about how people ship software on Windows. I'll just address one point: > Unfortunately is not a very flexible way to package anything into a single compiled executable. It is hard to ship an update - since you have to redeploy the executable anytime your program changes. Installing and updating executables on Windows is a solved problem. Solved. It's so easy to deploy patches and even have software self update that nobody thinks about it any more. The fact that Pharo is reinventing its own process under the cover of doing it better (which they don't, it's worse by all standards) is precisely the problem that I was referring to: Pharo (and Smalltalk people in general) still don't understand how to deploy software on modern computers.