4 ms·

There’s enough beginners guides to smalltalk. What there is none of is “smalltalk for working programmers”. Or “do meaningful things with smalltalk”. Pharo has

by olah_1 6y ago

There’s enough beginners guides to smalltalk. What there is none of is “smalltalk for working programmers”. Or “do meaningful things with smalltalk”. Pharo has some good guide books, but they still keep things contained just within the single VM. How do I read user input and spit something back out? Does all the activity need to take place inside the VM? Seems so constraining.

kencausey 6y ago
Can you be more specific? I'm sure you realize that there is full modern UI support in any reasonably up to date Smalltalk implementation, it even includes mouse and keyboard input support. If you mean accessing data from the filesystem, yes that can be done as well. And guess what, there is even network support. That said, if it comes down to more OS specific stuff, then yes, you may need to do more work. Squeak/Pharo very directly support loading external modules (platform specific code written specifically to a VM-specific API) as well as a reasonably competent FFI implementation. I have less knowledge of other implementations but I'm sure something similar is also available.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > I'm sure you realize that there is full modern UI support in any reasonably up to date Smalltalk implementation Contained to the VM itself, yes? I've never seen any information on packaging a GUI and making it presentable to a user. For example, what if I want to style/brand it to not look like Pharo or a smalltalk VM? How limited am I with that? > If you mean accessing data from the filesystem, yes that can be done as well. How? I've never seen it explained in a book, but I could easily have missed it. That's more of what I'm talking about though. For example, how do I read / parse a CSV for the computer? Or better yet, download a CSV from the internet and then parse it. > And guess what, there is even network support. I'm aware of this because I know there's a web framework. I think there's an entire book on this for Pharo.
  - igouy 6y ago
    Different Smalltalk implementations have done things differently — so the best answer to many questions is "it depends". > what if I want to style/brand it to not look like Pharo or a smalltalk VM? Use emulated platform widgets or native widgets or invent your own widgets. > Or better yet http://books.pharo.org/booklet-Scraping/html/scrapingbook.html http://books.pharo.org/booklet-Scraping/html/scrapingbook.ht...
dragonwriter 6y ago
> How do I read user input and spit something back out? I don't actually use Pharo though I've toyed with it; reading files is well documented (e.g., in the free book Deep Into Pharo). While I think there are convenience methods for standard input and output, but you can at a minimum use normal file access with /dev/stdin and /dev/stdout.

by olah_1 6y ago

kencausey 6y ago

Can you be more specific? I'm sure you realize that there is full modern UI support in any reasonably up to date Smalltalk implementation, it even includes mouse and keyboard input support. If you mean accessing data from the filesystem, yes that can be done as well. And guess what, there is even network support. That said, if it comes down to more OS specific stuff, then yes, you may need to do more work. Squeak/Pharo very directly support loading external modules (platform specific code written specifically to a VM-specific API) as well as a reasonably competent FFI implementation. I have less knowledge of other implementations but I'm sure something similar is also available.

olah_1 6y ago
> I'm sure you realize that there is full modern UI support in any reasonably up to date Smalltalk implementation Contained to the VM itself, yes? I've never seen any information on packaging a GUI and making it presentable to a user. For example, what if I want to style/brand it to not look like Pharo or a smalltalk VM? How limited am I with that? > If you mean accessing data from the filesystem, yes that can be done as well. How? I've never seen it explained in a book, but I could easily have missed it. That's more of what I'm talking about though. For example, how do I read / parse a CSV for the computer? Or better yet, download a CSV from the internet and then parse it. > And guess what, there is even network support. I'm aware of this because I know there's a web framework. I think there's an entire book on this for Pharo.
- igouy 6y ago
  Different Smalltalk implementations have done things differently — so the best answer to many questions is "it depends". > what if I want to style/brand it to not look like Pharo or a smalltalk VM? Use emulated platform widgets or native widgets or invent your own widgets. > Or better yet http://books.pharo.org/booklet-Scraping/html/scrapingbook.html http://books.pharo.org/booklet-Scraping/html/scrapingbook.ht...

dragonwriter 6y ago

> How do I read user input and spit something back out? I don't actually use Pharo though I've toyed with it; reading files is well documented (e.g., in the free book Deep Into Pharo). While I think there are convenience methods for standard input and output, but you can at a minimum use normal file access with /dev/stdin and /dev/stdout.