[diegoperini]

I lol'd when the quote, "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.", is accompanied with a relatively chaotic artwork of the development environment.

Anyways, the dedication of the team is really remarkable. It looks like a really useful learning/teaching tool for OOP. I'll try and hopefully beat my prejudice.

[crdrost]

I need to caution against using a Smalltalk dialect like Pharo to teach OOP.

The essential problem is that Smalltalk does OOP "right" and what one sees called OOP in the broader community generally does not have that same ideological purity. In addition Smalltalks are a deeply different vision of programming. I don't think I've ever shown a programmer a Smalltalk and had them go "Oh yeah this all makes sense." I have to preface it...

"This is a different vision of programming than you are used to, go ahead and run the executable."

"Um, it opened a desktop?"

"Yeah. So this is the program you are writing."

"What is?"

"This blank canvas."

"Oh, this is a text editor?"

"No, like, the program is running live right now."

"Well can I shut it down and edit it?"

"You edit it while it's still running. Here, go ahead and right click something..."

There's invariably some form of disbelief: surely we wouldn't have made this whole programming thing hard for no reason, so surely this approach to "everything is alive and you are mutating the ecosystem" is impossible for the simple reason that it is not ubiquitous.

[chaostheory]

So Pharo is a better version of Squeek?

[bitwize]

Pharo is a fork of Squeak with different goals.

[shobith]

For someone who's familiar with the "IDE" shown in the artwork, I was able to quickly parse the different components and it conveyed a vague sense of excitement :).

[bitwize]

Indeed. It harks back to the "holy shit, look at all the stuff you can do with our tool!" marketing of the 80s and 90s.

Microsoft used to market advanced versions of their BASIC -- such as QuickBASIC for DOS -- by having it open several windows on the screen and draw or animate something different in each. A similar program shipped as a demo for Microsoft's AmigaBASIC.

[shobith]

In any case, I'm not one to judge a programming system by its artwork. I hope people don't get discouraged by it and not try it out, It's a phenomenal system for translating thoughts to programs.

[vanderZwan]

Sure, but then you might not be the ideal target audience since you're already sold on the concept

[SomeHacker44]

When I see "pure" I think "side-effect free" but I sure do not think that is their intention in using that term of art here. I am pretty sure they mean "pure object-oriented" to mean "impure language where everything is an object".