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Comment by vixen99 | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting. A bit of explanation and background would be useful for those not familiar with Pharo. As I've mentioned before, a major IT publisher offers not a single book on Pharo or even Smalltalk where publication dates range no further than 1999. Have I missed a later one aside from the excellent 'Pharo by Example' and 'Deep into Pharo' available free online? I believe the community is buzzing but somehow I don't get that impression from without the inner circle of enthusiasts. Seems a pity.

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The free online books are enough to get started.

I would like to see larger adoption of Pharo in particular and immersive work environments in general.

In the 1980s I had a Lisp Machine with Smalltalk like visualization tools. As much as I appreciate modern languages and software stacks, I think that we have lost something. Even a good IDE like VisualStudio or IntelliJ have a "batch" processing feel to it: it takes a few seconds to rerun code and execution context is lost.

To some degree Emacs + Clojure is more interactive but the visualization tools are not as good as Pharo's.

I have spent time experimenting with the RTMondrian demos and this video will give me some incentive to write some code experiments. Really cool stuff.

"Click with the mouse on the background of the main window to show the world menu, then choose Workspace to create a new workspace."

That's from "Pharo By Example." Only, if you download Pharo today, the above description (and the illustration in the book's text) don't match the way Pharo works. As far as I can tell, Workspace is now called "Playground."

This is the problem with projects like this; and, believe me, I have been at least somewhat interested in Smalltalk for years. When I download something and come across the above by Page 3 or so, I just expect a lot of extra little frustrations that I don't need, and that turns me off to the rest of it. Smalltalk is different enough to begin with. I don't need extra aggravation.

But Pharo by Example comes with a Pharo version suitable with the book, you just hasto download it and use it. Of course, is an old Pharo version (1.1, I think), but enough to learn and jump to the newer versions. There is an update of the book coming soon too, btw).

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