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I looked for any useful documentation for a few minutes and just gave up. I don't want to read a book. I don't want to watch a video. This is not my first programming language, thank you. I just want a "hello world" example to get an idea what I am actually dealing with. How do I run a "hello world" program from the command line? How can I deploy that to another machine that doesn't necessarily have a GUI?

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> I just want a "hello world" example to get an idea what I am actually dealing with. How do I run a "hello world" program from the command line?

The trouble is that what you are dealing with is a graphical interactive programming environment. Sure, you can run it from the command line like /bin/perl, but to understand what you are dealing with you have to open it up and try it on its own terms.

If you aren't interested in a novel immersive programming environment then you can safely ignore Pharo too.

>If you aren't interested in a novel immersive programming environment then you can safely ignore Pharo too.

I was curious and so downloaded and ran the default image, and I'm beyond captivated by it, but I have to agree that neither the link nor the homepage do a good job of enticing me to do so, or even hinting and what can I expect.

If I didn't feel like setting up and checking out random projects I stumble upon, I would have never even seen what Pharo is about, given the abundance of marginally different programming languages that pop up on HN.

So yeah, I also think Pharo's best "Hello, World" is just opening it and trying out stuff, but maybe it should try to sell itself, at least a little, for the uninitiated?

Fellow Pharo contributors: we should take this feedback seriously

Agreed. The main website could benefit from somehow conveying the mind blowing power of using Pharo.

Maybe lots of little gifs?

Social proofs could work too. If you can't show me how powerful Pharo is visually, show me a bunch of people (preferably people whose names, or company/employers' names, I would recognize, but that's secondary) telling me how powerful Pharo is.

One thing that struck me a bit odd was, that the website makes it look like I have to buy a book or join a (paid?) mooc to get started, because these are the very first sections under "documentation".

I was just looking for a basic examples to get some sense what Pharo is about and what the look and feel are. Without downloading and installing it, I wasn't aware that there is a pretty nice interactive tutorial built in.

Maybe convey better how Pharo is distinct from other languages/environments and how to get going?

Pharo is indeed very easy to get started, but the website makes it appear harder than it actually is.

I don't remember the MOOC costing money, but it was in French with English subtitles which is understandable with them being French researchers at INRIA, but it couldn't keep my attention up due to the gap.

The books are all free in PDF form and the lead developer also has another website somewhere where he hosts old Smalltalk textbooks which are largely still relevant.

They certainly could work on conveying this better, but it is open source and likely not a high priority.

Sorry, if I came off as too negative!

For me it was just the initial perception I got. E.g. I only realized that the books were free after you told me. And yes, this is due to me evidently being too lazy doing an additional click. I don't mind paying for books, but not as a first step.

I did download and tried Pharo because I was intrigued by it from another person, if I just were to land on the website from some random link, I likely wouldn't have.

I think there could be some small changes in wording and presentation that would get a long way for people without any prior knowledge of the language. For example if you compare it to Rust (just content, not design wise)

https://www.rust-lang.org/learn

I see what you mean. I think Smalltalk and lisp have always suffered from poor marketing. There have been efforts to change this, but possibly too little too late.

Oh yeah, absolutely; seeing the MOOC featured so prominently, which I genuinely was in no mood for, I was just about resigned to having to aimlessly click around and run barely functional snippets - and then I open the image, and there's a super friendly beginner ready interactive tutorial!

Pharo might be the first project I've seen whose actual usability an user-friendliness is behind that of their presentation :)

> maybe it should try to sell itself, at least a little, for the uninitiated?

Guessing this is a hard problem. People have been working on marketing Smalltalk for almost 50 years now. If there were an easy solution I reckon they'd have found it by now :)

This seems a step worse, though. Neither the release page nor the main Pharo page even mention smalltalk, yet the documentation page talks about it as if it's the same thing (and only seems to point to books and videos, not basic introductions and tutorials). It's really strange for a programming language site to go to so much effort to hide its language.

Yes, I see that the announcement says that the FFI is improved, so I look at the documentation page to see how it is improved, and I see quite a few links, but these are mostly old links to contributed docs, none obviously covering the new release. I guess that the books page linked to documentation page is the one most likely to include anything about the FFI, but the newest book I spot there is 8 months old. Google search for pharo 7.0 FFI turns up the same release announcement and nothing else relevant.

Perhaps they are interested in using a novel immersive programming environment to develop an app that runs from OS command line without GUI.

Pharo does have commandline functionality, but that won't demonstrate its value as a first experience. For an interactive tutorial... open Pharo, then left-click background, Tools > Playground, type & highlight 'ProStef go', right-click & 'do it'.

Then try these one-liners in the Playground... https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/elegant-pharo-code-bb590....

Then (and I know its a video) but maybe serverless PharoLambda would interest you... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUbd0-FX6pI

Do you understand that you are not answering `virtualized`s question?

The question is not about a Pharo commandline that exists as part of the Pharo GUI.

The question is about an OS commandline like "GNOME Terminal" with stdio.

They do. By saying "there is such functionality, but you should try this instead, because using it from commandline won't tell you why this is interesting". Which isn't directly answering the question, but pointing the asker in a good direction.

Until the asker has been shown that their commandline requirements can be met — they will not be interested.

But it's entirely missing the point in that you don't use a Smalltalk environment so that you can run some hello world example from the command line.

A simple hello-world command-line example may be used to demonstrate:

— How to run a Smalltalk source code file as a script

— How to use stdio, How to use file handles

— How to load Smalltalk source code from files, save, deploy , and invoke on remote machines

Until `virtualized` has seen that basic stuff can be done, why should they care?

But this is about Pharo, which is a Smalltalk environment, which is different from how most programing languages are used. So starting from those kinds of questions is missing the point, when the focus should first be on seeing what makes a Smalltalk environment different.

> a Smalltalk environment

A Smalltalk implementation.

> So starting from those kinds of questions is missing the point…

The questions `virtualized` asked are simple and clear.

Telling `virtualized` that they are missing the point — instead of answering their questions — makes the community seem arrogant.

> Telling `virtualized` that they are missing the point — instead of answering their questions — makes the community seem arrogant.

However, virtualized stated that they gave up after five minutes because they couldn't find a hello world example similar to programming languages they're presumably familiar with, because they didn't want to watch a video or read a book. So explaining that the Smalltalk environment is different, and thus it doesn't make a lot of sense for Pharo's website to advertise with a command line example, is appropriate, since that implementation is GUI-based.

It would be akin to complaining about RStudio's site because someone couldn't quickly find how to run a hello world R script from the command line, when RStudio is about the IDE.

> … it doesn't make a lot of sense for Pharo's website to advertise with a command line example…

Pharo's website does attempt to "advertise with a command line example" — and then fails to show that the example works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18971588

Think Smalltalk is one case where thinking incrementally from what you already know about programming might be doing yourself a disservice.

We’ve converged on a computing and programming experience that is largely homogeneous across languages and platforms, and Smalltalk is definitely an alternate timeline tech.

I kind of like these systems because they remind me of when computers were weird and different and had legitimate tradeoffs. People’s expectations of computers were still rooted in a physical model of interacting with the world. Computers were still very much trying to prove that they were relevant to the “real world.”

Smalltalk is not so limited.

    COMMAND LINE:
    /opt/src/vw8.3pul/bin/visual nbody.vw_run.im -nogui -evaluate "BenchmarksGame program" -a 50000000

    PROGRAM OUTPUT:
    -0.169075164
    -0.169059907

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I'm not sure about deployment but the 'hello world' is essentially part of the environment:

https://i.imgur.com/JwgJ66z.png

You create a new image and then start piecing things together from there. GNU Smalltalk is probably what you want if you want to stick to the CLI. That said, it's not exactly a representative example when you want the same program that prints to stdout or something.

I'm curious to know about this aspect of it because my first step after the hello world is usually to figure out how to host the thing.

Edit: this would be more useful: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17259369

There's literally a command-line example (although it doesn't print Hello world, but the factorial of 42) on their front page.

That said, Smalltalk isn't something you use from the commandline typically, or only during deployment or for applying external automation. The GUI environment is fairly key.

No.

The website front page does not show a Pharo program being invoked from the OS command-line and using stdio.

Yes it does. The below is copied from the 'A glimpse of Pharo' section.

""" $ curl https://get.pharo.org | bash $ ./pharo Pharo.image eval "42 factorial" """

Are we to understand that:

— nobody hit the Enter key?

— the program does nothing?

— the program does something but there was no output?

— there was output but not to stdout?

etc etc

From the home page, in the A glimpse of Pharo section:

  $ curl https://get.pharo.org | bash 
  $ ./pharo Pharo.image eval "42 factorial"

Which apparently does nothing.

I got 1405006117752879898543142606244511569936384000000000 on my command line after running those commands.

Is that what the website home page shows?

You're really intent on splitting those hairs.

I've learned that a code snippet is not the same as working code.

How many of the programmers you know would be able to glance at the first ten of those digits and be able to say the result was correct?

How many would be able to say that `Hello, world` was correct?

> How do I run a "hello world" program from the command line?

You can load and run a smalltalk source file, at the OS command-line, something like —

    ./pharo Pharo.image st helloworld.st

You can pre-load smalltalk source files, save a memory image, and use default startup behavior to run the saved bytecode —

    ./pharo helloworld.image

> deploy that to another machine

It's just moving files (VM + bytecode image) so — rsync, ssh

> I just want a "hello world" example to get an idea what I am actually dealing with.

iirc something like —

    FileStream stdout nextPutAll: 'Hello, world'; cr.

You can do something like: `Stdio stdout nextPutAll: 'Hello, World!'.`

Are you suggesting that `FileStream stdout` doesn't work, or that using `Stdio stdout` is in some way better, or that `nextPutAll:` will add a newline, or that … ?

I think `FileStream` is deprecated in the new version of Pharo.

Thanks.

in case you get really curious: https://mooc.pharo.org/

also a hello world will never ever give you any idea about smalltalk/pharo.

don't be impatient, this is a system worth playing with, it's quite ~amazing.

Even after you download it, pick Pharo 7, and open it up, the "Explore Pharo" section points you to a page that doesn't work that says it's accurate for version Pharo 5. [0]

I finally found out that the magic invocation was to open up a window by clicking on the background, and navigating to Tools -> Playground, and running `Profstef go.` But they certainly didn't make it easy.

[0] https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/UpdatedPharoByExa...

As a beginner, ProStef (Mini tutorial) helped me get familiar with environment. To access that tutorial, it's on the welcome page in the Learn Pharo tab when you first launch the image. Hope that helps!

You don't. Smalltalk means GUI, pretty much.

Headless (no GUI) Smalltalk apps have been used commercially for decades.

But were the developed with the GUI and then deployed as a headless app?

And were the developed with the GUI and then deployed as a headless app.

Not from command line - but this will hopefully get you up and running in the IDE and have an idea what Pharo can do. or To deploy on another machine you simply copy the image file - so they can run from pharo. The image can be run headless (doesnt display GUI) if you need to deploy on a server.

Run PharoLauncher and Load a Pharo image instance.

Once the Pharo Desktop IDE appears type CTRL+O+T to open Transcript - the system log console abnd type CTRL+O+W to open playground - Playground is a window into which you can type. It can be used for any purpose, but is most often used for typing Pharo expressions and equickly executing them.

(There are windows /icon menu entries for these as well)

In playground window type:

     Transcript show: 'Hello World'

and press the play 'do it' icon at the top of the playground window to evaluate it

You should now see Hello World appear in the transcript window.

What you just did was send the Transcript objects show method the message 'Hello World'

Lets do a slightly more complex Cut and paste the following code into the Playground window and click the play button. The first part installs the Roassal visualization framework. It only needs to be run once. The second part uses ROassal's Mondrian API which offers facilities to describe and render graphs. Mondrian allows mapping of metric values and properties into visual dimensions, such as shape and colors. Cut and paste the second piece of code into playground and hit play doit icon to evaluate. In the view panel you should see a simple tree class browser of the installed classes in the Pharo image with size of class coloured and scaled to represent number of source code lines in each class. Note lines in speach marks are comments.

"-------------------------------------"

"install Roassal visualization engine"

"-------------------------------------"

Gofer it

  smalltalkhubUser: 'ObjectProfile' project: 'Roassal2';

configurationOf: 'Roassal2';

	    loadStable.

"---------------------------------------------------"

"- Make a Simple interactiver Class Tree Browser -"

"---------------------------------------------------"

myBrowser := RTMondrian new.

myBrowser nodes: Collection withAllSubclasses.

myBrowser edges connectFrom: #superclass.

myBrowser normalizer

  normalizeSize: #numberOfMethods;

  normalizeColor: #numberOfLinesOfCode.

myBrowser layout tree.

myBrowser

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