8 ms·

Pharo 2.0 Released

77 points by MarcusDenker 14y ago

svc 14y ago
It is awesome to see that Smalltalk, after all this time, is being driven forward like that ! Just be careful: once you get deep enough into the beauty of Smalltalk, you will be changed forever and it will be hard to go back.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  I used Smalltalk Visual Works back in 1996 in an university project and it was quite good experience. The current development environments still have some catch up to do with the Smalltalk and Lisp machine offerings. The only environment I know tried to replicate a similar experience is the family of Oberon operating systems, because Wirth wanted to explorer a similar experience, but using a strong typed language.
emaringolo 14y ago
I haven't seen a bigger release for a Smalltalk dialect in the last several years. Great work!
- dh83 14y ago
  And we're eager to top this in the following years ;)
philippeback 14y ago
Pharo 2.0 released: tons of new shiny things, an image that is moving the whole system forward. Really, being involved in this is like being tied to a rocket surpassing escape velocity. Check the real meat here: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/ActionsInPharo20 http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/ActionsInPharo20 https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W7 https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W7
stuffihavemade 14y ago
Is Seaside still being developed? Seems that it died out with DabbleDB being bought up and the take over of the client side js frameworks.
- dh83 14y ago
  Yes seaside is still in active development and there is progress on getting a nice configuration working on Pharo 2.0. Until then you can use our manual build from https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/Seaside-2.0/ https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/Seaside-2.0/ to test it.
  - emaringolo 14y ago
    It isn't fully functional, is it? The image from the CI opens with an STDOUT error. What's missing to have a "nice" (working?) configuration for Pharo 2.0?
    - dh83 14y ago
      Seaside works, yet it has not been officially release for 2.0 hence we rely on a gofer script to load all dependencies. What error? I doubt it's related to seaside. And for the configuration we mostly need somebody to do it :) since the seaside config is pretty big on its own you got to be careful when changing things for a new release.
- philippeback 14y ago
  Of course, and there is integration with jQueryMobile even. http://jquerymobile.seasidehosting.st http://jquerymobile.seasidehosting.st
  - stuffihavemade 14y ago
    Ah, I see. I stop by seaside.st every once and a while, and it doesn't seem to have been updated with any new news for a long time. It would be cool to mention some of these developments on its front page.
rasur 14y ago
Double ended fun! Pharo at the backend, Amber smalltalk on the client. Excellent news from the Pharo team! It's the most fun I've had playing with computers for almost a decade - Long may it continue!
- philippeback 14y ago
  True! And releases so close in time: awesome. Also, on iOS and OSX, one can use a WebView in the VM which is showing HTML/JS genereated amber served from the image. That's close late binding.
- diminish 14y ago
  Could someone explain, why pharo matters? I just noticed it on HN#1, and never heard of it before.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    it's one of the (maybe "the") most popular open source smalltalk environments. It matters in the same way a new ruby/python/clojure release matters, though it's not as popular.
  - emaringolo 14y ago
    It is the most recent release of a the Smalltalk based programming environment, Pharo. If you never heard of Smalltalk, you can google it. But as a summary I can tell you it is the father of Object-Oriented Programming, BitBlt, the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Unit Testing practice (SUnit), the Refactoring engine, among other things people take for granted today.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
skrishnamachari 14y ago
Great Milestone to all Smalltalk diehards. Kudos to the Pharo Team. Serves up a bigger notice of stuff that will happen in the next two years... Smalltalk is definitely on upsurge, if Pharo beats up the drum and the momentum like this. Will look forward to fervent Smalltalk with Pharo in the decade ahead.. through all enterprise works..
xutopia 14y ago
The home page of any project should tell us straight up what it is.
- abredow 14y ago
  The homepage does. This link is to the release announcement.
  - timdorr 14y ago
    They include an alt text on the logo image. Why not put that text into the image itself? I see a description is in the title of the page, but that gets cut off in my browser. "I do enjoy Pharo" is also not a very helpful quote, especially if I don't know who Kent Beck is.
    - dh83 14y ago
      What you don't know Kent Beck!! :D and yes even to me that quote is rather meaningless :P. I'll try to get the at least the ALT text updated.
  - DucktourDreams 14y ago
    It tells what it is in terms of Smalltalk. I don't remember what Smalltalk was. It was old when I was a kid.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
plinkplonk 14y ago
Did the new compiler make it into this release? Does anyone know?
- dh83 14y ago
  Nope, even though it is ready for 2.0 it was not included in the release. If you are more interested you can have a look at the prepared jenkins images https://ci.inria.fr/rmod/job/Opal/ https://ci.inria.fr/rmod/job/Opal/ .
  - gecko 14y ago
    What was new in the compiler?
    - dh83 14y ago
      Cleanups and a modern implementation with proper separation of the compiler toolchain. Additionally they introduced a nice new IR representation to do more sophisticated changes. All in all it does not come with fancy new features but a more solid and clean codebase.
bergie3000 14y ago
Strange that the Pharo home page doesn't explain what Pharo does. I'm not familiar with Pharo and after scrutinizing the Pharo home page I'm still don't have a clue what it does. I see a lot of mentions of Smalltalk on this page yet 'Smalltalk' doesn't appear on the Pharo home page. Am I missing something? If I'm not already familiar with Pharo, am I simply not part of the intended audience?
- vincentperes 14y ago
  agree, really hard to find out what it is, the only work that I catch and gave me a hint is 'virtual machines', but still pretty vague
  - epo 14y ago
    Must be really hard to figure you are looking at a download page and then to click on "home".
- adamors 14y ago
  Not trying to be a dick or anything, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharo
- rasur 14y ago
  There's a link on the home page - "About" which goes into a bit more depth.
- nextputall 14y ago
  On the top of the website you can see: "Pharo is a clean, innovative, open-source Smalltalk-inspired environment". Basically it is a programming language + ide + image based virtual machine.
- Garoof 14y ago
  > I see a lot of mentions of Smalltalk on this page yet 'Smalltalk' doesn't appear on the Pharo home page. Huh? Are we looking at the same page? On the home page I see "Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk-inspired environment." (Note that the HN link is not to the home page, but to the 2.0 download page.)
ed_blackburn 14y ago
I read so much about small talk from a historical perspective, I'm curious..can anyone explain how and why it matters now?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- emaringolo 14y ago
  That depends a lot on your background and interests. But if you like dynamic languages, and being highly productive with a "years ahead" development environment, then Pharo is a good alternative. Many of the features you see added today to mainstream IDEs, have a background in Smalltalk. Even in Chrome Debugger the "code hot swap" is a showcase feature, whilst Smalltalk have it since decades. And of course, Smalltalk provides features that no other environment/languages provides yet. So if you want to take advantage of those now, instead of waiting for them reaching mainstream, then it matters to use it now. Features like those provided by Moose (http://moosetechnology.org/ http://moosetechnology.org/) will take years to be available as an Eclipse Plugin. :)
- gecko 14y ago
  In some sense, it "matters" as much as dozens of other "fringe" language projects (Ceylon, F#, Kotlin, etc.). It brings a different way of thinking to the table. If that way of thinking is one you like, great. If not, move onto the next one. But beyond that, I think the whole reason Pharo matters is that its team is doggedly bringing Smalltalk out of the historical context. Pharo has libraries for things like XML, JSON, OAuth, Redis, and OpenID so that you can interact with other tools. It has support for command-line applications, comes with an easy-to-use C FFI, and sports a fast JIT so that it's usable for real applications. It has rewritten libraries for speed, breaking backwards compatibility where necessary, and has completely overhauled the UI, while keeping all the pieces that made Smalltalk great. So part of why Pharo matters is that it makes Smalltalk a real, modern language, that can trivially integrate with the massive ecosystem that is existing software. No longer is Smalltalk living in its own little world; it now plays well with others. As for Smalltalk itself: it still has valuable lessons, even today. Smalltalk is the only system I know where I can trivially save the running app to disk and open that running app, complete with all of its state, on another system to debug what went wrong. It still has some of the best debugging and development tools of any environment I've used for any language. Smalltalk in general, and Pharo in particular, is still one of the most solidly turtles-all-the-way-down environments I have used in my life, where there's no meaningful distinction between your app, and the core system libraries. Smalltalk may not be for you, but Pharo makes it a genuinely viable choice for real-world development.
sj4nz 14y ago
Someone needs to put what "Pharo" is on the front page of their web site somewhere else other than just the title element in the header which I ignore most of the time. Browser tabs are usually really narrow if you have 8-9 open. :) I had to come here to learn it was a Smalltalk environment.
- fferen 14y ago
  This is just the download page, the front page has more info: http://www.pharo-project.org/home http://www.pharo-project.org/home
- emidln 14y ago
  To be fair, it was on the link labeled Home and the link labeled About. I did have to click away from the download page to learn what it was about, but unless the whole site is single page, I don't see this as a bad thing.
- teapot7 14y ago
  So true - and sadly so common. If I had my way every website for a program/ide/library/plugin/whatever would clearly state on the front page just what the hell it is! Glad to see Pharo making such excellent progress - they're doing wonderful work.
dmpk2k 14y ago
Does Pharo support multiple hardware threads? How does the performance compare with VisualWorks?
- emaringolo 14y ago
  No, it doesn't. It is single process with "green threads". Same as node.js ;-)
worldhell129 14y ago
I'm sorry, I've been turned off of pharo and smalltalk completely. Mostly due to the fact that I had it forced upon me for my Advanced Algorithms class. I don't like pharo, and I don't like smalltalk
- philippeback 14y ago
  Your loss mate. That says more about the ability of your teacher or the fact that you have some kind of history of abuse by whoever than about the Pharo system. I guess if he would have used Lisp, you'd dislike Lisp, if it was C++, you'd hate C++. What are you using, out of curiosity?
  - worldhell129 14y ago
    C++ and java mostly.
- sigzero 14y ago
  Really now? You just wanted to spit your hated out? And this was constructive to the topic? Why not just, move along and not post?
  - worldhell129 14y ago
    Yup, I just wanted to spit my hate out because of the countless number of hours I've wasted using pharo and smalltalk in general. The images feel extremely fragile, the whole environment feels slow. Just scrolling in pharo eats up my cpu. Smalltalk may be an okay language (but extremely terrible to have to be mandatory for an advanced algorithms class), but pharo in my opinion isn't very good and just plain annoying. Also, for the record I've used pharo for two courses and I hated both courses with a passion just because I had to use pharo.
    - nextputall 14y ago
      Have you ever used eclipse or netbeans? Those feels an order of magnitude slower than pharo. I consider pharo a small and fast environment compared to other "IDEs".
Zenchess 14y ago
Smalltalk is a great language/environment. I think the killer app for it right now is html5 games. You can program the server back end in pharo smalltalk, and the client frontend in amber smalltalk. On both ends, you get full interactivity, ability to inspect and change state, and the ability to debug and modify the code in real-time without any code/compile/run cycle.
callinyouin 14y ago
As someone with essentially no experience with Smalltalk, let me offer some criticism. (It's constructive criticism, I promise :) I'm a CS student taking a programming languages course, and for our term project we need to learn a new programming language, write a small project in the language and write a paper on its implementation, features, strengths, weaknesses, etc. After reading about an awful lot of languages, I thought Smalltalk would be an interesting choice, at least on the implementation side, given its relatively unique image-based system, not to mention having a graphical component, essentially an IDE, at the core of the environment. Since Pharo seemed like the most popular choice, I decided to give it a shot. I was excited to get started, so I figured I could download the "one-click" for version 1.4 and get started right away. After extracting the zip and being given a .app folder, I thought I had mistakenly downloaded the Mac version. Nope, the website clearly says "For OS X, Linux, and Windows". Right off the bat this shows that Mac is probably the "first-class citizen", and it definitely doesn't show that the developers know how to properly distribute their software for multiple platforms (whether or not it's true, that's what it looks like). Since my platform of choice is Linux, and having seen the half-hearted attempts at supporting Linux from so many vendors so many times in the past, I started to get a bad feeling. I found the README, whose only information is to run the .sh file included. I ran it and was given the helpful message that the "Contents/Linux/pharo" file was missing. Finding that hard to believe, I navigated to where that file was supposed to be located and, sure enough, there it was. After doing some detective work, I found the reason for my missing file message was due to the pharo binary being built for 32-bit systems. NOWHERE on Pharo's home page or download page is this apparent. No warning is given to the new, unsuspecting, 64-bit-OS-having user. If anyone involved with the Pharo project is reading this, please understand that this is unacceptable. In 2013, if some software is built for 32-bit OS's only, the user should not only be warned before they decide to download the software, but something less cryptic than a misleading "file not found" error when trying to run the software would be helpful. I guess I can't say for sure, but to me this looks like almost no effort was put into helping new users get started. Still somewhat determined to get this thing running, I installed an incredible amount of 32-bit libraries. Still no luck. I got to the point where a "could not find module vm-display-X11" is displayed. The file does exist, it's just another case of the 32-bit library blues. I installed some additional X11 32-bit compatibility libraries, but still had no luck. Unable to justify wasting more time getting this thing working, I just gave up. I really wanted to spend some time with Pharo, but I guess the developers don't care about newcomers who don't already know the in's and out's of the system. I'm sorry, but if you want any sort of Smalltalk comeback that I've been reading so much about, this is absolutely NOT the way to do it.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
Is this news? Just asking because I have had Pharo 2.0 installed for many months, but it was probably a beta - it would be good to have dates on download files and bundles. I ask because I tried running "System update" and that errored off. If I am using an old version of "2" then I will go to the trouble of re-installing and reloading my little project.
- dh83 14y ago
  Unless you regularly updated and worked on the latest 2.0 beta this is news ;). You have a complete list of images here http://pharo.gforge.inria.fr/ci/image/20/ http://pharo.gforge.inria.fr/ci/image/20/ including release dates. During the beta update process it might happen that one or another update fails. Usually that should not happen though.
  - mark_l_watson 14y ago
    I did system updates, eventually got (mostly)everything loaded (after a few re-trys), but then the image wouldn't save. So: it only took me a minute or two to fileOut my application packages and reload them and data into a new image. I should have done this in he first place :-(
    - dh83 14y ago
      or use http://smalltalkhub.com http://smalltalkhub.com in the first place :)

77 points by MarcusDenker 14y ago

svc 14y ago

It is awesome to see that Smalltalk, after all this time, is being driven forward like that ! Just be careful: once you get deep enough into the beauty of Smalltalk, you will be changed forever and it will be hard to go back.

pjmlp 14y ago
I used Smalltalk Visual Works back in 1996 in an university project and it was quite good experience. The current development environments still have some catch up to do with the Smalltalk and Lisp machine offerings. The only environment I know tried to replicate a similar experience is the family of Oberon operating systems, because Wirth wanted to explorer a similar experience, but using a strong typed language.

emaringolo 14y ago

I haven't seen a bigger release for a Smalltalk dialect in the last several years. Great work!

dh83 14y ago
And we're eager to top this in the following years ;)

philippeback 14y ago

Pharo 2.0 released: tons of new shiny things, an image that is moving the whole system forward. Really, being involved in this is like being tied to a rocket surpassing escape velocity. Check the real meat here: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/ActionsInPharo20 http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/ActionsInPharo20 https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W7 https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W7

stuffihavemade 14y ago

Is Seaside still being developed? Seems that it died out with DabbleDB being bought up and the take over of the client side js frameworks.

dh83 14y ago
Yes seaside is still in active development and there is progress on getting a nice configuration working on Pharo 2.0. Until then you can use our manual build from https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/Seaside-2.0/ https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/Seaside-2.0/ to test it.
- emaringolo 14y ago
  It isn't fully functional, is it? The image from the CI opens with an STDOUT error. What's missing to have a "nice" (working?) configuration for Pharo 2.0?
  - dh83 14y ago
    Seaside works, yet it has not been officially release for 2.0 hence we rely on a gofer script to load all dependencies. What error? I doubt it's related to seaside. And for the configuration we mostly need somebody to do it :) since the seaside config is pretty big on its own you got to be careful when changing things for a new release.
philippeback 14y ago
Of course, and there is integration with jQueryMobile even. http://jquerymobile.seasidehosting.st http://jquerymobile.seasidehosting.st
- stuffihavemade 14y ago
  Ah, I see. I stop by seaside.st every once and a while, and it doesn't seem to have been updated with any new news for a long time. It would be cool to mention some of these developments on its front page.

rasur 14y ago

Double ended fun! Pharo at the backend, Amber smalltalk on the client. Excellent news from the Pharo team! It's the most fun I've had playing with computers for almost a decade - Long may it continue!

philippeback 14y ago
True! And releases so close in time: awesome. Also, on iOS and OSX, one can use a WebView in the VM which is showing HTML/JS genereated amber served from the image. That's close late binding.
diminish 14y ago
Could someone explain, why pharo matters? I just noticed it on HN#1, and never heard of it before.
- riffraff 14y ago
  it's one of the (maybe "the") most popular open source smalltalk environments. It matters in the same way a new ruby/python/clojure release matters, though it's not as popular.
- emaringolo 14y ago
  It is the most recent release of a the Smalltalk based programming environment, Pharo. If you never heard of Smalltalk, you can google it. But as a summary I can tell you it is the father of Object-Oriented Programming, BitBlt, the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Unit Testing practice (SUnit), the Refactoring engine, among other things people take for granted today.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

skrishnamachari 14y ago

Great Milestone to all Smalltalk diehards. Kudos to the Pharo Team. Serves up a bigger notice of stuff that will happen in the next two years... Smalltalk is definitely on upsurge, if Pharo beats up the drum and the momentum like this. Will look forward to fervent Smalltalk with Pharo in the decade ahead.. through all enterprise works..

xutopia 14y ago

The home page of any project should tell us straight up what it is.

abredow 14y ago
The homepage does. This link is to the release announcement.
- timdorr 14y ago
  They include an alt text on the logo image. Why not put that text into the image itself? I see a description is in the title of the page, but that gets cut off in my browser. "I do enjoy Pharo" is also not a very helpful quote, especially if I don't know who Kent Beck is.
  - dh83 14y ago
    What you don't know Kent Beck!! :D and yes even to me that quote is rather meaningless :P. I'll try to get the at least the ALT text updated.
- DucktourDreams 14y ago
  It tells what it is in terms of Smalltalk. I don't remember what Smalltalk was. It was old when I was a kid.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

plinkplonk 14y ago

Did the new compiler make it into this release? Does anyone know?

dh83 14y ago
Nope, even though it is ready for 2.0 it was not included in the release. If you are more interested you can have a look at the prepared jenkins images https://ci.inria.fr/rmod/job/Opal/ https://ci.inria.fr/rmod/job/Opal/ .
- gecko 14y ago
  What was new in the compiler?
  - dh83 14y ago
    Cleanups and a modern implementation with proper separation of the compiler toolchain. Additionally they introduced a nice new IR representation to do more sophisticated changes. All in all it does not come with fancy new features but a more solid and clean codebase.

bergie3000 14y ago

Strange that the Pharo home page doesn't explain what Pharo does. I'm not familiar with Pharo and after scrutinizing the Pharo home page I'm still don't have a clue what it does. I see a lot of mentions of Smalltalk on this page yet 'Smalltalk' doesn't appear on the Pharo home page. Am I missing something? If I'm not already familiar with Pharo, am I simply not part of the intended audience?

vincentperes 14y ago
agree, really hard to find out what it is, the only work that I catch and gave me a hint is 'virtual machines', but still pretty vague
- epo 14y ago
  Must be really hard to figure you are looking at a download page and then to click on "home".
adamors 14y ago
Not trying to be a dick or anything, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharo
rasur 14y ago
There's a link on the home page - "About" which goes into a bit more depth.
nextputall 14y ago
On the top of the website you can see: "Pharo is a clean, innovative, open-source Smalltalk-inspired environment". Basically it is a programming language + ide + image based virtual machine.
Garoof 14y ago
> I see a lot of mentions of Smalltalk on this page yet 'Smalltalk' doesn't appear on the Pharo home page. Huh? Are we looking at the same page? On the home page I see "Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk-inspired environment." (Note that the HN link is not to the home page, but to the 2.0 download page.)

ed_blackburn 14y ago

I read so much about small talk from a historical perspective, I'm curious..can anyone explain how and why it matters now?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
emaringolo 14y ago
That depends a lot on your background and interests. But if you like dynamic languages, and being highly productive with a "years ahead" development environment, then Pharo is a good alternative. Many of the features you see added today to mainstream IDEs, have a background in Smalltalk. Even in Chrome Debugger the "code hot swap" is a showcase feature, whilst Smalltalk have it since decades. And of course, Smalltalk provides features that no other environment/languages provides yet. So if you want to take advantage of those now, instead of waiting for them reaching mainstream, then it matters to use it now. Features like those provided by Moose (http://moosetechnology.org/ http://moosetechnology.org/) will take years to be available as an Eclipse Plugin. :)
gecko 14y ago
In some sense, it "matters" as much as dozens of other "fringe" language projects (Ceylon, F#, Kotlin, etc.). It brings a different way of thinking to the table. If that way of thinking is one you like, great. If not, move onto the next one. But beyond that, I think the whole reason Pharo matters is that its team is doggedly bringing Smalltalk out of the historical context. Pharo has libraries for things like XML, JSON, OAuth, Redis, and OpenID so that you can interact with other tools. It has support for command-line applications, comes with an easy-to-use C FFI, and sports a fast JIT so that it's usable for real applications. It has rewritten libraries for speed, breaking backwards compatibility where necessary, and has completely overhauled the UI, while keeping all the pieces that made Smalltalk great. So part of why Pharo matters is that it makes Smalltalk a real, modern language, that can trivially integrate with the massive ecosystem that is existing software. No longer is Smalltalk living in its own little world; it now plays well with others. As for Smalltalk itself: it still has valuable lessons, even today. Smalltalk is the only system I know where I can trivially save the running app to disk and open that running app, complete with all of its state, on another system to debug what went wrong. It still has some of the best debugging and development tools of any environment I've used for any language. Smalltalk in general, and Pharo in particular, is still one of the most solidly turtles-all-the-way-down environments I have used in my life, where there's no meaningful distinction between your app, and the core system libraries. Smalltalk may not be for you, but Pharo makes it a genuinely viable choice for real-world development.

sj4nz 14y ago

Someone needs to put what "Pharo" is on the front page of their web site somewhere else other than just the title element in the header which I ignore most of the time. Browser tabs are usually really narrow if you have 8-9 open. :) I had to come here to learn it was a Smalltalk environment.

fferen 14y ago
This is just the download page, the front page has more info: http://www.pharo-project.org/home http://www.pharo-project.org/home
emidln 14y ago
To be fair, it was on the link labeled Home and the link labeled About. I did have to click away from the download page to learn what it was about, but unless the whole site is single page, I don't see this as a bad thing.
teapot7 14y ago
So true - and sadly so common. If I had my way every website for a program/ide/library/plugin/whatever would clearly state on the front page just what the hell it is! Glad to see Pharo making such excellent progress - they're doing wonderful work.

dmpk2k 14y ago

Does Pharo support multiple hardware threads? How does the performance compare with VisualWorks?

emaringolo 14y ago
No, it doesn't. It is single process with "green threads". Same as node.js ;-)

worldhell129 14y ago

I'm sorry, I've been turned off of pharo and smalltalk completely. Mostly due to the fact that I had it forced upon me for my Advanced Algorithms class. I don't like pharo, and I don't like smalltalk

philippeback 14y ago
Your loss mate. That says more about the ability of your teacher or the fact that you have some kind of history of abuse by whoever than about the Pharo system. I guess if he would have used Lisp, you'd dislike Lisp, if it was C++, you'd hate C++. What are you using, out of curiosity?
- worldhell129 14y ago
  C++ and java mostly.
sigzero 14y ago
Really now? You just wanted to spit your hated out? And this was constructive to the topic? Why not just, move along and not post?
- worldhell129 14y ago
  Yup, I just wanted to spit my hate out because of the countless number of hours I've wasted using pharo and smalltalk in general. The images feel extremely fragile, the whole environment feels slow. Just scrolling in pharo eats up my cpu. Smalltalk may be an okay language (but extremely terrible to have to be mandatory for an advanced algorithms class), but pharo in my opinion isn't very good and just plain annoying. Also, for the record I've used pharo for two courses and I hated both courses with a passion just because I had to use pharo.
  - nextputall 14y ago
    Have you ever used eclipse or netbeans? Those feels an order of magnitude slower than pharo. I consider pharo a small and fast environment compared to other "IDEs".

Zenchess 14y ago

Smalltalk is a great language/environment. I think the killer app for it right now is html5 games. You can program the server back end in pharo smalltalk, and the client frontend in amber smalltalk. On both ends, you get full interactivity, ability to inspect and change state, and the ability to debug and modify the code in real-time without any code/compile/run cycle.

callinyouin 14y ago

As someone with essentially no experience with Smalltalk, let me offer some criticism. (It's constructive criticism, I promise :) I'm a CS student taking a programming languages course, and for our term project we need to learn a new programming language, write a small project in the language and write a paper on its implementation, features, strengths, weaknesses, etc. After reading about an awful lot of languages, I thought Smalltalk would be an interesting choice, at least on the implementation side, given its relatively unique image-based system, not to mention having a graphical component, essentially an IDE, at the core of the environment. Since Pharo seemed like the most popular choice, I decided to give it a shot. I was excited to get started, so I figured I could download the "one-click" for version 1.4 and get started right away. After extracting the zip and being given a .app folder, I thought I had mistakenly downloaded the Mac version. Nope, the website clearly says "For OS X, Linux, and Windows". Right off the bat this shows that Mac is probably the "first-class citizen", and it definitely doesn't show that the developers know how to properly distribute their software for multiple platforms (whether or not it's true, that's what it looks like). Since my platform of choice is Linux, and having seen the half-hearted attempts at supporting Linux from so many vendors so many times in the past, I started to get a bad feeling. I found the README, whose only information is to run the .sh file included. I ran it and was given the helpful message that the "Contents/Linux/pharo" file was missing. Finding that hard to believe, I navigated to where that file was supposed to be located and, sure enough, there it was. After doing some detective work, I found the reason for my missing file message was due to the pharo binary being built for 32-bit systems. NOWHERE on Pharo's home page or download page is this apparent. No warning is given to the new, unsuspecting, 64-bit-OS-having user. If anyone involved with the Pharo project is reading this, please understand that this is unacceptable. In 2013, if some software is built for 32-bit OS's only, the user should not only be warned before they decide to download the software, but something less cryptic than a misleading "file not found" error when trying to run the software would be helpful. I guess I can't say for sure, but to me this looks like almost no effort was put into helping new users get started. Still somewhat determined to get this thing running, I installed an incredible amount of 32-bit libraries. Still no luck. I got to the point where a "could not find module vm-display-X11" is displayed. The file does exist, it's just another case of the 32-bit library blues. I installed some additional X11 32-bit compatibility libraries, but still had no luck. Unable to justify wasting more time getting this thing working, I just gave up. I really wanted to spend some time with Pharo, but I guess the developers don't care about newcomers who don't already know the in's and out's of the system. I'm sorry, but if you want any sort of Smalltalk comeback that I've been reading so much about, this is absolutely NOT the way to do it.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

Is this news? Just asking because I have had Pharo 2.0 installed for many months, but it was probably a beta - it would be good to have dates on download files and bundles. I ask because I tried running "System update" and that errored off. If I am using an old version of "2" then I will go to the trouble of re-installing and reloading my little project.

dh83 14y ago
Unless you regularly updated and worked on the latest 2.0 beta this is news ;). You have a complete list of images here http://pharo.gforge.inria.fr/ci/image/20/ http://pharo.gforge.inria.fr/ci/image/20/ including release dates. During the beta update process it might happen that one or another update fails. Usually that should not happen though.
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  I did system updates, eventually got (mostly)everything loaded (after a few re-trys), but then the image wouldn't save. So: it only took me a minute or two to fileOut my application packages and reload them and data into a new image. I should have done this in he first place :-(
  - dh83 14y ago
    or use http://smalltalkhub.com http://smalltalkhub.com in the first place :)