Learning Smalltalk from “Pharo by Example”

As a diehard functional programmer (who used to shun OOP as a fad) who's been dabbling with Pharo over the last few weeks, I must say I'm impressed. And, like the article pointed out, I'm having the same "seeing the light" experience that I first had with Lisp and Erlang.

After experiencing what OOP is really all about, an interactive environment with live objects sending messages to each other, readily available to be inspected and manipulated [0], I find it a drag to go back to Python and Clojure (less so) on my day job.

I now feel like every other OOP implementation (without the live environment) is just a horrific bastardized version of Smalltalk.

[0] http://simberon.blogspot.nl/2013/01/swimming-with-fish.html

Last year I added a touch of programming to my 9 year old son's home school activities. We tried several learning tools, starting with Scratch. I don't have anything negative to say about the various options we tried. However, the most positive exercise was him going through the "Prof Stef" tutorial built into Pharo. He really got into exploring and interacting with objects using tradition Smalltalk inspectors and workspaces (Do it, Show it, Inspect it). He loved that he could close the environment and open it the next day with all his play right where it was.

As a father, I loved that I didn't feel like a fraud as I could easily help him dig around and answer just about any question on what's really going on.

It is worth noting that there is also a book on Seaside, a continuation-based web framework that runs in Pharo: http://book.seaside.st/book

Going through Pharo By Example, and especially the similar book "Dynamic Web Development with Seaside"[0] (a smalltalk web framework), really helped me to understand many concepts in OOP. Seaside is worth checking out simply for how differently it does things (the author describes it as a "heterodox" framework). As others have said, once you experience the joy of the flow of programming in Smalltalk with a great environment, it's difficult to not miss it when using other languages.

[0] http://book.seaside.st/book

Edit: Actually, I guess some of the things done in Seaside are now more common, such as building up a webapp from reusable components that have code and some local state coupled with a view.

I didn't really get oop until I learned Smalltalk, working through this book, and subsequently through the Seaside one, was a revelation.

It ruined things for me, most everyday tools and languages look messy and inelegant next to Smalltalk.

Good article. I was at first taken aback though by the negative comment in the second to last paragraph about the book being out of date. But, the book is a little out of date.

I am mostly programming my current passion project in Clojure and Clojurescript, but, I shadow my project with a version in Pharo. I love the environment for experimenting and the visibility to what is going on in a computation is a refreshing change from trying to figure out when something goes wrong in my Clojurescript code.

Can Pharo/Squeak programs utilize multiple cores? Last I checked, they used green threads and there weren't any plans to add true multi-threading.