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Comment by ofrzeta | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's my age but I am getting increasingly tired of the same articles about Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo being on the edge of a breakthrough. Surely Smalltalk is nice and also has its place in the history of programming languages. Today, however, there's such a vast number of interesting programming languages that are used "in production" that I doubt Smalltalk will suddenly get more traction.

What makes articles like this one really annoying are the same old claims that seem to be a bit delusional if not outright wrong, such as:

"the Pharo IDE is much simpler and cleaner than Visual Studio and Eclipse. Even children can use it without difficulty!"

The accompanying screenshot surely doesn't support that claim.

View on HN

"Simpler and cleaner" Proceeds to show a window inside a window with 7 panels filled with lists and text everywhere.

I was not sure if they were joking or if they were serious.

Maybe it's because nothing related to files is showing up. For example, Java has packages, classes, protocols (interfaces), methods, and documentation. All of these are visualized in a Java IDE. But Java _also_ has folders and files, so these need to be visualized, as well.

At least in Java there's a pretty clear mapping from packages and classes to folders and files. In PHP, the mapping is not so clear.

Edit: I'm not saying I agree with the author, I'm just pointing out one aspect.

It's not about the number of windows but about the very simple model of what they show.

i kind of agree. i use pharo, and i love working with it. it is actively developed and its interface is improving with every release.

what i like about it though, is not the IDE but the image based development:

that i can debug and fix an application while it is running. that, for certain classes of errors, i can pause an application (or it will pause by itself), and simply resume after fixing the error.

maybe 10 years ago, and certainly 20 or 30 years ago, smalltalk's IDE was ahead of its time. today, many alternatives exist.

but image based development is limited to very few platforms. only smalltalk, lisp and a few others offer that.

i also like that smalltalks syntax is incredibly minimalistic.

the downside is that smalltalk effectively requires you to forget all the tools you worked with before. but this is again, where pharo development makes its mark. it is now well integrated with git for example.

we all know that git has its issues and a learning curve, and many GUIs are trying to make git more accessible. pharo managed to integrate git in a way that it works well with the traditional smalltalk development style while at the same time allowing it to take advantage of the strengths that git has to offer.

greetings, eMBee.

Even children can use it

Im my generation children used assembly language without any problems, and those who didn't have assemblers just worked out the hex codes on paper and POKEd them in and CALLed them.

Maybe it's my age but I am getting increasingly tired of the same articles about Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo

They want to sell you courses.

"Even children can use it without difficulty!"

IMO A child would only find it easy to use if they were already a seasoned coder. The IDE looks overly complicated.

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