Pharo, not quite Smalltalk, possibly worse than VisualWorks | Hacker News Reader

Pharo, not quite Smalltalk, possibly worse than VisualWorks

smackeyacky.blogspot.com

4 pointssmackeyacky11 comments

The writer couldn’t do something in a new system after 10 minutes of searching, so sure it must be “some kind of weird cult” ;-) Seriously though, I hear them about the lack of UI painter. Many of us have been longing for one but as always it’s a case of FOSS and limited resources. The Spec framework does make GUI creation pretty easy, but obviously not as satisfying as a painter. That said, after many years in many languages I haven’t found a system as powerful as Pharo with a community/libraries with critical mass. And GToolkit on top has been a game changer

Well, in terms of speed, the programming language benchmarks game indicates VW is way faster than Pharo. See https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I'm curious about what VW does different to be so fast, given the Cog virtual machine used by Pharo and Squeak is regarded as a small work of art, and is quite fast itself (at least way faster than Python). I hope the next iteration of the VM (called Sista) finally beats VW Smalltalk.

Note "cpu load" — Cincom Smalltalk provides a way to use multi core.

Note as-of July 2021 on Quora — "… started working together on Sista in 2012. We were able to demonstrate speed ups of around three fold but it remains a prototype, needing about one or two years of development to yield a production quality implementation."

The smalltalk development efforts on both squeak and pharo seem pretty dead. I went back for another crack at VisualWorks after this blog post. Part of the original frustration I had was just not being in a Smalltalk mode of working. I am enjoying it more and resumed work on the aws browser with more success after I relearned some old habits.

IMHO both communities are small, but very active for their size. The only that appears "dead" for me is GNU-Smalltalk. At least the versions in Debian and Debian-based distro repositories look barely maintaned. I could not get their class browser working anymore. You can see lots of complaints about it on the web, and the issue persists for years.

OK - perhaps I didn't look hard enough - will go back through their links to forums etc.

On linux, I think the XFT parcels are a requirement for legible text on VW Smalltalk.

I didn't have any trouble with the legibility of the text on Debian Buster using Gnome. There are the occasional screen glitches with things like the tree view but mostly the experience on Windows and Linux is identical, which is the same as it was 25 years ago on Sun workstations.

On the contrary, both communities are very active. Pharo and Squeak both have active mailing lists with dozens of messages each day, and the Pharo community maintains a very lively Discord server

I don't know much about Smalltalk. Is a GUI designer supposed to be a mandatory piece of an implementation?

In the 1990s it was. VisualAge, Dolphin, VisualWorks and Digitalk all had gui painters. They were competing against Visual Basic and things like Powerbuilder. For a lot of customers, a gui painter was the killer part of the deal, because back then it was notoriously hard to make interfaces.

They have fallen out of fashion I guess but for rapid development back then, if you didn't have a gui painter you didn't sell your dev environment.

I am pretty old fashioned, I just expected some minimal painter to be available in Pharo, maybe somebody can point one out. The tutorials for the Pharo gui environment are quite daunting. The VisualWorks ui painter is awful but at least it exists.

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