| From your "learning experience report"(Dec 2017) linked further down I see that two of your main gripes relate to Bloc and Iceberg(Git). * Bloc is not a "Released" subsystem. While its development group report Bloc is stabilizing and encourage more people to start exercising it, Bloc is not on the Pharo 7 Release roadmap. Pharo 6 is current stable release. * For a long long time, Monticello was Pharo's main source code control system. Responding to general criticism that Smalltalk sometimes lives in its own shoebox and doesn't interface well to "standard" systems, Pharo is spending significant effort on Iceberg to adopt Git as its main version control system (I don't know of any other Smalltalk that has a GUI Git tool). But Iceberg is quite a new subsystem with a Technical Preview release in Pharo 6.0. It was initially slow to draw new users from Monticello as many users were not familiar with git, so bugs remained that were only exposed with broader use. Last December I was trying Iceberg and also experienced crashes with it. One thing to keep in mind is that Pharo's usually great stability is due to everything being implemented in itself on a garbage collected virtual machine, i.e. memory-violation errors eliminated. Iceberg makes use of the "libgit" external C library via FFI. While this aligns with Pharo's policy of not reinventing the wheel (another oft criticism of Smalltalk) but does allow memory errors that normally could never occur. So the Iceberg subsystem is not a good benchmark to judge the stability of the rest of Pharo. btw, Lately I've found Iceberg stability quite improved and I started using it daily. Also, based on constructive feedback an improved GUI is planned. * Around December there was also bug in the new Garbage Compactor related to the conversion of the VM from 32-bit to 64-bit. This is a complex system that took a while to identify, diagnose and correct. Unfortunately I think you landed in a perfect storm. If the presenter was trying to show off the latest features I guess you got caught up on the bleeding edge of development. Part of the problem here is Pharo bleeding edge is usually quite stable (I use it daily), but we of the Pharo choir better placed to work around any hiccups in order to push Pharo forward. But these should not be exposed to newcomers and you don't have time to deal with them in a classroom setting. I'm sorry this damaged your impression of Pharo, but please understand how your broad statements damage Pharo in turn. |