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Comment by Zenchess | Hacker News Reader

Just a heads up the pharolauncher does not seem to be working for me, at least for pharo 9. Manual download of vm + image 64bit works but 32 bit does not.

I have been making pharo raylib bindings and plan to make a video soon about why Smalltalk is an interesting choice for game development, it's a very 'live-coding' feel, i.e. you run your game while the editor is still live, you have free reign to at any time modify the methods of all game objects, execute random code, etc. without restarting the game...

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(incidentally: it's "free rein" as in horses, not "free reign" as in monarchs)

thanks, i've probably been making that mistake for years...

Not a lesson I was expecting to learn today, but here we are. I always thought it was the "reign" version because monarchs can "reign freely".

Yeah, the more usual wording is "given a free rein", which makes it a little clearer. A monarch isn't given their reign, it's theirs by right (well, with a bit of hand-waving. Or possibly sword-waving, but not since Henry VII).

For English kings you forgot William III

Actually I think the last king to go into battle at all was George II.

The last English king to try to reign with no constraints was Charles I, it didn't end well for him.

James II entertained the same delusions as Charles of being absolute monarch. He had a kinder fate, being carefully allowed to escape twice on his journey to France.

Giving 'free rein' comes from the pragmatic practice of allowing a horse to chose the best path over difficult terrain on the grounds that the animal would know better than the rider.

What, really?

Welp, I've had that wrong my entire life.

One of the more sensible eggcorns out there, admittedly.

A few years ago i was actually considering making a Smalltalk "dialect" (which i called Gametalk :-P) just for gamedev - some modern engines remind me a lot of Smalltalk in how they work, but they obviously stop at the resource editing level. So i thought that making the entire thing "live" and in itself would be the next obvious step.

(the reason i decided for a dialect is that modern Smalltalks carry a TON of baggage they collected over the decades - sure the language is tiny but they carry more objects than a transatlantic freighter :-P - and i wanted something lean with only the stuff i needed)

I never went beyond the prototyping phase but probably will pick the project up again if i end up getting annoyed by my current language and framework choices :-P.

You might take a look at Cuis as a possible starting point. Its goal is to be a lean dialect of Smalltalk.

Yeah i've seen Cuis at the past, it is certainly a leaner Smalltalk compared to Pharo (though TBH i am not a fan of Squeak's UI). If nothing else it can serve as inspiration.

Also now that i think about it, Cuis might be a good Smalltalk environment for starting out or learning about the language in general since i always get the feeling that the more feature packed dialects like Pharo are a bit intimidating.

Juan has done some really impressive work on Morphic3, which uses a vector graphics engine of his own design. He's also pared down Cuis' version of Morphic to its most basic elements, so one could change the appearance of the UI to whatever, theoretically

Someone made a bridge between Pharo and Godot which looks pretty interesting. I've not dabbled in it myself yet, but they have a doc describing how it works: https://gitlab.com/chandler.justin.s/godot-talk-VM/-/blob/ma...

It is called Objective-C. :)

there was a problem with the PhL, that took more time to update of what we thought. Now it should be working... but please take into account that 32bit versions are deprecated (unless you're working on ARM)

It (Pharo9 launcher I just downloaded) seems to want to launch my Pharo7 installation. Should I uninstall everything and try again?

Yeah, I'm having trouble with Pharolauncher too on Windows. Trying to launch any image (downloaded in launcher, or manually) results is an error. e.g.

  Retry?
  Error downloading 'https://files.pharo.org/get-files/90/pharo-vm-Windows-X86_64-stable.zip'
  Cancel
  Retry

(The link is a 404, so that's something)

Edit: "Templates: Pharo image (stable)" works (32bit v8)

It turns out to be the capital 'X' in X86 that is the problem. The same URL but with a lowercase 'x' works fine. Presumably someone in the Pharo team need to fix whatever image metadata the Pharo launcher is working from.

Are you on macOS? I installed Pharo 9 yesterday and had to use the command line install method. The Pharo Launcher puts images and other files in ~/Documents which I find problematic. I created a folder ~/Pharo, cc’d to it, and ran the curl command line installation option.

I wish that there were a Common Lisp with a Pharo like UI, like my old Lisp Machine.

Sounds very interesting, i look forward to your video. Where will i be able to find it?

I made a new youtube channel where the focus will be on Smalltalk game development

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9QoB2Ik54E1gEJsBixqJ9A

Alternatively I'll be sure to post it to the pharo discord and the smalltalk subreddit

And you just doubled your number of subscribers (I'm number two). Now you have to upload something for us! ;)

Please make a very small and simple game (a toy game :-)) first to help people get the clue before the things go complex.

Raylib is fantastic fun, very much looking forward to seeing your progress.

it requires an update :)

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