8 ms·
The page seems to be going out of it's way to not mention the word "Smalltalk". Does anyone have an idea why that is? Does Smalltalk have such a bad reputation
by a2800276 5y ago
The page seems to be going out of it's way to not mention the word "Smalltalk". Does anyone have an idea why that is? Does Smalltalk have such a bad reputation nowadays or has someone trademarked the term?
- vfclists 5y agoIt is mostly marketing bullshit. Pharo IS Smalltalk in the same way Skoda is Volkswagen
- blooalien 5y agoI know a buncha literal rocket scientists who swear by Smalltalk with a heavy bias toward the Squeak VM as bein' the best thing since sliced bread, but I honestly rarely hear about it outside those particular circles. Mostly I hear about Javascript, .NET/Mono, and Python in other programming language circles I frequent.
- samatman 5y agoIf you look at the home page for Racket, you won't see the word "Scheme" anywhere. Same thing, basically: neither language wants to be beholden to what's come before, nor to their peers.
- zabzonk 5y agoI've noticed that as well - it's a bit strange given that Pharo is a fork of Squeak, which does proclaim its ST origins on its front page. I wouldn't say Smalltalk has a bad rep nowadays, but it used to be knocked for being too expensive (the cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke), too slow, and producing nasty-looking non-native GUIs. These have almost all been fixed.
- igouy 5y ago> cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke March 7, 1988 "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95" https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=digitalk+smalltalk+v/286&source=bl&ots=jg-JNM2df5&sig=zCZ6zSeRV1zcLMT_VhaK49_YWkQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CFIQ6AEwB2oVChMIh-Xi5qS9xwIVkCWICh1taQpK#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=P... > nasty-looking non-native GUIs The "non-native GUI" was quite important because Smalltalk was running on MS-DOS — not on MS-Windows.
- varjag 5y agoWell $200 in 1980s is something like $500 today. I don't think I own any piece of software costing that much.
- igouy 5y agoAnd … ? Dec 1988, MS Word 5.0 for MS-DOS, $450.
- goatlover 5y agoAdobe products can cost that much on a yearly basis.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoThat seems like an ahistorical objection. $199 was a very reasonable price for a powerful dev tool in 1988. A lot of software at the time cost much, much more. Look up historical prices for just about any contemporaneous commercial software. You can still argue they would have done better in the long run by marketing themselves as "Turbo Smalltalk" at $69.99. But that's a different argument than "wow that's way overpriced," which simply wasn't the case.
- igouy 5y ago"The list price is $150 each for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and for a bundle containing both Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger." p8 October 1988 https://books.google.com/books?id=WSBVAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA18-PA8 https://books.google.com/books?id=WSBVAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA18-PA8 Smalltalk/V 286 included source-code debugger, bit mapped WIMP for MS-DOS, BitBlt graphics, … Turbo Pascal + debugger already cost more.
- hota_mazi 5y agoThe animated screenshots on the website pretty much indicate that the Pharo GUI is still non native and looking very dated and ugly.
- xkriva11 5y agoMost tools were modified to use Spec framework so they can use the native look (using GTK) as well as the non-native one. (plus, in future, Web and Console backends). This transition should be finished in the next release.
- codesnik 5y agohm, does Pharo have native-looking GUI now?
- xkriva11 5y agosee this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843214
- zabzonk 5y agoWell, let's say "better" :-) There was a Smalltalk with a native Windows GUI (Dolphin) but the developers couldn't seem to make any money out if it.
- igouy 5y ago"ParcPlace VisualWorks Smalltalk emulates all the supported operating systems GUIs in Smalltalk … Digitalk (now ParcPlace) Visual Smalltalk uses more of the underlying operating system GUI, for better performance but at the price of only supporting a common subset of GUI controls … IBM Smalltalk maps the Motif GUI widgets onto the underlying operating system widgets.This means you get a very rich kit to build your GUI, but the widgets operate at near native speed. You have the best of both worlds." p87 "VisualAge for Smalltalk" 1997 http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/4instantiations/sg244828.pdf http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/4instantiations/sg24482... aka What's the difference between Swing and SWT,
- xkriva11 5y agoIt has basically two reasons. First, it is to prevent conflicts like: "Pharo is Smalltalk, look, it is written on its web page! How do dare you to change this? You are allowed to improve this if and only if all the other Smalltalk implementations do that too!" [exaggerating]. Pharo has many differences from standard Smalltalk (different File API, class definitions, traits, slots, small grammar changes...). The second reason is that the general knowledge about Smalltalk is very poor, and most people only remember that it is something old and long dead. Try to sell a dead fish.
- a2800276 5y agoInteresting, thank you. It still seems weird to me, though. I feel Smalltalk is mostly mentioned with positive connotations (as opposed to, say Cobol) and would guess more people have heard of Smalltalk than Pharo and it would help orientation. So I was assuming something nefarious :) Is there an overview of the differences somewhere?
- xkriva11 5y agoI sometimes ask young programmers or people interested in old computers if they know Smalltalk and what they think of it. Try it too, you might be surprised at the results. I don't know of any such list of differences, and I don't think it's of much use either.There is ANSI Smalltalk, which is very limited and most implementations go well beyond its scope, so you have to compare each implementation separately anyway.
- xkriva11 5y agoIt follows Kay's advice: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMJoLicXsAA7dej?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMJoLicXsAA7dej?format=jpg&name=...
- valera_rozuvan 5y agoCheck out https://consortium.pharo.org/ https://consortium.pharo.org/ - you will see: "A clean, innovative, open-source, Smalltalk-inspired environment."
- speed_spread 5y agoMaybe Smalltalk sounds old like COBOL. It's hard to re-kindle interest in old tech in the eyes of new devs. It seems every generation of programmers want to have their "own" tools, even if they're worse than the previous ones.
- dimal 5y agoI always had positive connotations of Smalltalk. Seemed it was talked about as if it was OOP “done right” before Java messed things up. That’s just me though.
- skissane 5y agoCOBOL's big problem has always been verbosity rather than age. Fortran and Lisp are older yet both have a more positive image. Fortran and Lisp are each far more succinct languages than COBOL. (Contemporary Fortran and Lisp have evolved a lot since their initial version, but the same is true of COBOL.)
- pjmlp 5y agoYou mean like C, born in 1972?
- pjmlp 5y agoI guess maybe because Pharo has moved beyond Smalltalk-80, and is its own thing nowadays, just like Raket is no longer just Scheme.
- goatlover 5y agoBut the language itself is still Smalltalk with some extra classes, right?
- jhgb 5y agoKind of. At the very least you get traits, dynamic array literals and such that you don't get in "classic" Smalltalk.
- xkriva11 5y agoSmalltalk is just a simple meta-language (like Lisp and Forth). In your system, you may have the same or very similar syntax and keep some degree of compatibility but be very different in many practical aspects. For example, Pharo has Collections API very similar to Smalltalk but very different Files API or UI API. It has another class building strategy with stateful traits, slots, some syntax extensions, different source files format etc.
- mumblemumble 5y agoPharo considers itself to be Smalltalk-inspired. Maybe the most succinct explanation of what this means comes from their vision document[1]: > What we want to say is that if there is something that can be improved but does not conform the ANSI Smalltalk, we will do it anyway. This really does seem to be a fundamental value within the Pharo community, and it distinguishes them from the rest of the Smalltalk community. When observing the communities around Squeak or the commercial Smalltalks, I often get the impression that they view themselves as a sort of Jedi order that's trying to preserve an older, better tradition amidst a decadent modern world. The Pharo community, by contrast, actively acknowledges that Smalltalk was not perfect, and is working hard to improve many things about it, including some of the fundamentals. For example, Pharo's made active steps to make their platform more amenable to source control, and, by extension, collaboration among larger groups of people. [1]: https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/30434/PharoVision.pdf https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/30434/PharoVision.p...