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I used Pharo in my Object Oriented course at the Univeristy (for my CS degree) and I was really surprised for this paradigm. We saw Haskell and Pharo and I was really happy to discover new things from a language point of view. It is hard to say that Java or any other imperative language is OO after seeing Smalltalk/Pharo.

About the question if it's used in production, the teacher for that segment of the course was a specialist who worked on big companies and showed us examples of being used and we were (again) blown away.

I never fully understood it (although I passed that course), but it's one of the things I'd like to know it better: not for usage, but out of curiosity.

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> It is hard to say that Java or any other imperative language is OO after seeing Smalltalk/Pharo.

This.

It so frustrates me to see people trash talk on "OOP" in HN and other forums, where I know people never really got to really realize what it could really be about. Just hacky approximations.

I'm sure that functional silver bullet will avoid this cycle some how. /s

I think that's true for most paradigms.

Most people see .prototype and the end-all-be-all of Prototypal Inheritance and base everything they think they know about it, from how a frontend from the early 2000s was coded.

They work through some lisp book in school, have an exam and think that's all lisp development can give you.

Same for functional programming, where most "we love functional programming" companies just compose some small-ish functions in a chain and call it a day.

Everything that is initially niche, finds a good fit and becomes "mainstream" or even a bit popular, tends to be mushed into some other paradigm while getting there.

Could you give a good example of functional programming that does not follow that method? I am very interested.

This is one of my biggest frustrations about online programming discussions. The vast majority of complaints about OOP I've seen online are really complaints about Java and C++, and many of the problems are simply not present in Common Lisp or Smalltalk.

Java shares a lot with Smalltalk though, even if on the surface it has a C++ like syntax, the semantics are closer Smalltalk/Objective-C.

Same applies to C#.

Sure Proxy classes aren't a replacement for #doesNotUnderstand:, the metaclasses are relatively poor when compared to Smalltalk metaclasses, and hot code reloading isn't the same as having a Smalltalk image, but that is about it.

Eclipse was born out of Visual Age for Smalltalk, and the experience isn't that much dissimilar when taking those differences into account.

C++ had two Smalltalk/CL like environments, Energize C++ and Visual Age for C++ v4, they failed to gain adoption due to hardware requirements.

C++ Builder offers a bit of what they did, but its price point means only big enterprises care about it.

Nowadays VC++ with hot reload, or Clion with Live++, are the closest that one can get to Energize/VA.

I'd be interested in some of these industry use case stories if you could share something.

Not the OP but JP Morgan’s Kapital system which underpins their credit hybrids business was smalltalk.

I say was because i believe it’s been deco’d in the past few years but i don’t know for sure, when i worked at JP it was still a core breadwinning system.

I believe the core of Gemstone is smalltalk - it's an object database/runtime and supports java as well - they also sponsored/made maglev ruby (now dead?):

https://gemtalksystems.com/about/customers/

Most of them were financial industries, and a gov body in charge of tax processing and that stuff.

They have an extensive list at https://pharo.org/success/.

What book did you use?

I don't remember using a book for this part of the course.

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