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Comment by xkriva11 | Hacker News Reader

This is a long list of rare features that make Pharo interesting:

I don't know if it's my eyesight declining but that postcard is hard to read. Wikipedia has a svg file with higher resolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pharo_syntax_postcard.svg

Well, the light gray on white background has horrible contrast. I think that'd give most people trouble.

AFAICT the big benefit of Pharo is on-the-fly introspection and the tooling to support dynamic introspection.

quick q: I can see the benefit for creating developer tools like the IDE and maybe for creating domain specific languages (DSLs)... but what "regular" applications benefit from this?

in particular, I can see (widespread use of...) introspection making it difficult for a developer of one large Pharo codebase to understand and maintain a different Pharo codebase...

also, Python has (arguably) "good enough" introspection and DSL support and mindshare/marketshare of millions of developers. When is python not good enough?

(asking innocently - please don't shoot)

There are a lot of cases where good enough is actually good enough. Python, Java, C#, Go, TypeScript, they are not 'pure enough' to 'too OOP' for some, but at the end of they day, they are good enough to realise the potential that the business process they support requires.

> introspection and the tooling to support dynamic introspection (...) what "regular" applications benefit from this?

Ever use developer tools in the web browser? Do you imagine they make Gmail harder or easier to debug and maintain?

What is also rare is the quality of the site. Impressive.

Unless you’re on mobile…

Perhaps, I don't do mobile.

I wasn't commenting on the layout, I meant the description of the features, the animations and 'balloons'.

One of the most polished presentations of features I've seen on any OSS project.

Don't do mobile?

I only compute at the (home) office.

For people who are actively using their smartphones for many tasks. They're in majority I guess.

I personally use smartphone as a phone, off-line GPS, camera (when I happen to not carry dedicated one) and to control various gismos like drones.

I do not use it for reading, viewing websites, computing, etc.

What about music and videos/films?

I admit carrying a separate e-ink device is too much of a hassle, so I read books on the smartphone when am not at the PC.

It depends one's lifestyle. I have my own company and work from home for 20 years already. So the PCs with the big 4K screens are always around. When I go to my summer's office it is the same thing. So I read/watch videos from the PC.

Yes there were few situations when I knew I'd sit in a car and wait for someone for quite a while. So I downloaded book on laptop and read it. I tried reading from a smartphone but my brain simply can not digest properly from this size of a screen. When I read I follow the line but I also glance at the whole page. Not sure why but this is how it works for me.

Nothing rare about most of these features as they came from Squeak. What's really rare is how slimy they're being in at least implying most of these features are unique to Pharo in their marketing of it. There is not a single mention of Squeak or Smalltalk, which their project is derived from[1], on the page. It's unfortunate as they have put a lot of effort in expanding on the previous work and created a nice UI to make the environment more productive and accessible which they can legitimately take credit for.

[1] I don't mean 'inspired by', they literally started off with a fork of the code of both the VM and image. This is perfectly legit per the license, but it's hardly a completely original work.

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