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Comment by ed_blackburn | Hacker News Reader

I read so much about small talk from a historical perspective, I'm curious..can anyone explain how and why it matters now?

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In some sense, it "matters" as much as dozens of other "fringe" language projects (Ceylon, F#, Kotlin, etc.). It brings a different way of thinking to the table. If that way of thinking is one you like, great. If not, move onto the next one.

But beyond that, I think the whole reason Pharo matters is that its team is doggedly bringing Smalltalk out of the historical context. Pharo has libraries for things like XML, JSON, OAuth, Redis, and OpenID so that you can interact with other tools. It has support for command-line applications, comes with an easy-to-use C FFI, and sports a fast JIT so that it's usable for real applications. It has rewritten libraries for speed, breaking backwards compatibility where necessary, and has completely overhauled the UI, while keeping all the pieces that made Smalltalk great. So part of why Pharo matters is that it makes Smalltalk a real, modern language, that can trivially integrate with the massive ecosystem that is existing software. No longer is Smalltalk living in its own little world; it now plays well with others.

As for Smalltalk itself: it still has valuable lessons, even today. Smalltalk is the only system I know where I can trivially save the running app to disk and open that running app, complete with all of its state, on another system to debug what went wrong. It still has some of the best debugging and development tools of any environment I've used for any language. Smalltalk in general, and Pharo in particular, is still one of the most solidly turtles-all-the-way-down environments I have used in my life, where there's no meaningful distinction between your app, and the core system libraries.

Smalltalk may not be for you, but Pharo makes it a genuinely viable choice for real-world development.

While I appreciate that your comments are intended to promote Pharo, you seem to be saying that other Smalltalk implementations don't provide support for command-line applications, C FFI, a fast JIT, usable for real applications.

That doesn't seem right to me.

I think, in my head, I implicitly also had "open-source" in that list.

There are several open-source Smalltalks that have some of these things, but I believe that Pharo is the only one that does all of them. For example, GNU Smalltalk is the only other Smalltalk I know that has a decent command-line interface, but it lacks a JIT. (If I have this wrong, hopefully Paolo will correct me.) You can absolutely use Squeak to write real-world applications, but the last I checked, you still had to either use the older, slower FFI or write a plugin if you wanted to call C, and the official distributions still do not include a JIT. Cuis is largely a subset of Squeak, and therefore has similar features and drawbacks, and so on and so forth.

If you go closed-source, you do have more options. VisualWorks has a good C FFI and a fast JIT, and might have a great command-line interface (I honestly don't remember), but it's not even free-as-in-beer for hobby projects anymore. Dolphin is likewise fast and has great COM bindings and good libraries, but is proprietary, and has disappeared and come back enough I'm not entirely sure I'd feel comfortable spending money on it.

So, yes, you're right, there are other Smalltalks that fulfill some of these requirements, but Pharo is, as far as I know, the only open-source one that fulfills all.

>> VisualWorks ... but it's not even free-as-in-beer for hobby projects anymore. <<

Nonsense.

"3. License Fees. This license is granted to you for your personal use only. Therefore, no license fees are involved, unless you breach the terms and conditions of this Agreement."

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/developer-community/tryi...

>> Dolphin ... I'm not entirely sure I'd feel comfortable spending money on it. <<

So don't -- "Dolphin Community Edition is our Smalltalk development environment that is FREE for personal/educational use."

http://www.object-arts.com/products/dce.html

Dolphin is stagnated since several years. It's a beatiful piece of Software, and the best Smalltalk Dialect in terms of native Windows integration. So good integration that its low level developer (Blair McGlashan) is working at Microsoft since several years ago.

Pharo has quite a decent set of command-line tools at hand for a Smalltalk (see also http://pharobooks.gforge.inria.fr/PharoByExampleTwo-Eng/late...). As for FFI we're about to fully integrate NativeBoost into the system which already provides decent FFI interaction on all X86 platforms: https://code.google.com/p/nativeboost/. The VM we use features a JIT, albeit not highly elaborate, it gives decent speedups. Besides that there is some research of mine going on, on how to implement the JIT native code generate at language side, which would give us the Smalltalk-level control over that piece.

Wonderful!

(I didn't ask about Pharo, I complained about promoting Pharo by dissing other Smalltalk implementations.)

You can't really put F# in that category. It's shipped with Visual Studio since 2010, and has a significant userbase.

Agreed, it also it has significant industry usage.

That depends a lot on your background and interests.

But if you like dynamic languages, and being highly productive with a "years ahead" development environment, then Pharo is a good alternative.

Many of the features you see added today to mainstream IDEs, have a background in Smalltalk. Even in Chrome Debugger the "code hot swap" is a showcase feature, whilst Smalltalk have it since decades.

And of course, Smalltalk provides features that no other environment/languages provides yet. So if you want to take advantage of those now, instead of waiting for them reaching mainstream, then it matters to use it now.

Features like those provided by Moose (http://moosetechnology.org/) will take years to be available as an Eclipse Plugin. :)

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