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Smalltalk is incredibly cool, but I think one of the main things stunting it is it doesn't have a great free implementation. The only modern smalltalk environme

Smalltalk is incredibly cool, but I think one of the main things stunting it is it doesn't have a great free implementation. The only modern smalltalk environment I've used which felt like a serious environment was VisualWorks, and to download that you have to fill out a form and you can only use it under a "personal use" license. Squeak, despite being impressive, has always felt like a toy. I like Pharo in spirit, but GUI wise, it looks really off. If I can use a weird metaphor to describe it: it's like reading a brilliant PhD thesis written in Comic Sans. That's what the GUI reminds me of. The content is brilliant, but the presentation really leaves you scratching your head. I know it's not fair to judge an entire development environment off its aesthetics, but people are going to do it anyway.

gecko 13y ago
I get what you're saying, but it's also really weird to me. You cannot sanely use Pharo or Squeak to write native apps right now; that's totally true. You also couldn't do that for Visual Works, except for a very narrow window when they properly emulated enough Windows XP widgets you could probably fake it. But Pharo and Squeak proper look (to me) neither more nor less native than IntelliJ, which people happily use. Both have professional-looking IDEs that do not look native. That doesn't impact you if you're doing web work, command-line work, etc. There are lots of other reasons I would finger instead (C interop was historically poor, people were historically reticent to use VMware-image-like language environments, etc.), but Pharo and Squeak have looked fine for most purposes for awhile.
- igouy 13y ago
  >You also couldn't do that for Visual Works, except for a very narrow window when they properly emulated enough Windows XP widgets you could probably fake it.< You could always do the work yourself to properly emulate whichever UI look and behavior was needed. (Which was both blessing and curse.) >There are lots of other reasons I would finger instead...< Lack of standardization between vendor implementations.
- overgard 13y ago
  You're probably right about visual works, I haven't used it since 2005 so I kind of fell in that window. I don't have a problem w/ non-native looking GUI's in principle, but I just think Squeak and Pharo are kinda fugly. Bad spacing, weird colors, weird fonts. If that only effected my development environment I could live with it, but if the apps I make are also going to look like that? Ick. The only thing I'd really use it for is writing games where GUI's are always going to be custom anyway. (I think Smalltalk in general would be great for game development actually.) Another thing is that at least in other smalltalks, it generally used OS windows at least. The controls might look weird, but it does feel like part of the system. Writing code in Squeak feels like you're either using a VM or Remote Desktop, it's just totally isolated. The thing is most of these, in isolation, aren't deal killers, but once you've added up enough weird points it gets a bit too weird. You could make similar arguments about Java, but I think the difference is in magnitude: Java's weirdness is kind of weird, smalltalk's weirdness is really weird.

gecko 13y ago

I get what you're saying, but it's also really weird to me. You cannot sanely use Pharo or Squeak to write native apps right now; that's totally true. You also couldn't do that for Visual Works, except for a very narrow window when they properly emulated enough Windows XP widgets you could probably fake it. But Pharo and Squeak proper look (to me) neither more nor less native than IntelliJ, which people happily use. Both have professional-looking IDEs that do not look native. That doesn't impact you if you're doing web work, command-line work, etc. There are lots of other reasons I would finger instead (C interop was historically poor, people were historically reticent to use VMware-image-like language environments, etc.), but Pharo and Squeak have looked fine for most purposes for awhile.

igouy 13y ago
>You also couldn't do that for Visual Works, except for a very narrow window when they properly emulated enough Windows XP widgets you could probably fake it.< You could always do the work yourself to properly emulate whichever UI look and behavior was needed. (Which was both blessing and curse.) >There are lots of other reasons I would finger instead...< Lack of standardization between vendor implementations.
overgard 13y ago
You're probably right about visual works, I haven't used it since 2005 so I kind of fell in that window. I don't have a problem w/ non-native looking GUI's in principle, but I just think Squeak and Pharo are kinda fugly. Bad spacing, weird colors, weird fonts. If that only effected my development environment I could live with it, but if the apps I make are also going to look like that? Ick. The only thing I'd really use it for is writing games where GUI's are always going to be custom anyway. (I think Smalltalk in general would be great for game development actually.) Another thing is that at least in other smalltalks, it generally used OS windows at least. The controls might look weird, but it does feel like part of the system. Writing code in Squeak feels like you're either using a VM or Remote Desktop, it's just totally isolated. The thing is most of these, in isolation, aren't deal killers, but once you've added up enough weird points it gets a bit too weird. You could make similar arguments about Java, but I think the difference is in magnitude: Java's weirdness is kind of weird, smalltalk's weirdness is really weird.