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Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, I'm interested in Smalltalk, is it a viable option in 2014? Does anyone use it professionally? Personally? Open source projects?

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I earn my bread with Pharo Smalltalk. And I use all the modern trappings:

CI with Jenkins Source versioned in Github Unit tests

Used to use Java, C, C++, PHP, and some Tcl/Tk.

Smalltalk is above all of these in terms of pleasure of coding. That's factor number one for me as this is what keeps motivation high.

I've been able to be faster, with less errors, and more features than any of the aforementioned languages once I passed a given experience threshold.

Pharo works nicely with the command line and on headless servers.

One can write text files that are loaded at runtime too, so scripting it fine too.

It would be nice to have a webdav view on an image so that one could have that "files" view and edit things with Vim for example. Well, one can do that already with a git checkout, I am just speaking about doing it on a live image. There are working POCs of that (e.g. Spoon from Craig Latta) and some work is going forward in that direction as well these days.

DabbleDB was written using Seaside, a framework which ran in Squeak (and other Smalltalk implementations).

DabbleDB met with rave reviews. http://press.dabbledb.com/ Within a couple of years the company behind it were bought by Twitter (2010) and DabbleDB closed down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB Clearly Twitter didn't buy this Smalltalk company because their product was a threat to Twitter.

It may well be that there are hugely successful corporations who are using Smalltalk and keeping quiet about it. Or it may be that being a successful Smalltalk developer is a sign of being a great developer.

You might want to take a look at flow, the full stack framework to make single page applications with Smalltalk https://github.com/flow-stack/flow

Yes, yes and yes but professionally will be hard. Plenty of folks on the pharo list would be happy to help get you started.

Is Pharo the state of the art?

In open source, yes. And probably also overall. They are even doing iOS targetting, if I remember correctly.

At least many of the commercial Windows implementations (Dolphin?) seem to be a bit dormant.

No, the state of the art are commercial versions that still persist like VisualWorks, the Smalltalk I used at the university in the early 90's.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/

Pharo is the closest thing to a de facto standard. It has a huge following, perhaps even the biggest of all Smalltalk users. It's the reference implementation for Seaside, the best of the Smalltalk web frameworks. It's the reference implementation for Amber, the best of the client-side web tools. I see little reason to consider anything else.

The best part of Pharo is that you get everything from the ground up: VM code, image objects, tools, all is accessible and can be shaped to one's will.

Try to do that with Eclipse or IntelliJ's tools!

This is making one reach an understanding of the computing platform which is very beneficial in terms of mastering one's craft.

This, and also I am specifically interested in if you can do modern web development in it, and if playing with smalltalk will result in similar epiphanies that learning multiple functional languages did.

It's hard to embed in your regular flow because of the image based nature. If regular files systems and git(hub) are your thing be prepared for some drastic adjustments.

Also, it is quite slow. But it is definitely worth a look just for the added insights into what programming could be like.

"If regular files systems and git(hub) are your thing be prepared for some drastic adjustments."

Not so with Pharo. And "slow" relative to what? Surely not compared with Ruby or Python, two of HN's darling languages.

Slow? You mean in execution? You can't mean in development!

I'm working on this and feels great https://github.com/flow-stack/flow

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