| LOL sorry about that. But still, yeah. > So the UNIX philosophy was the only possible way computing could have gone to result in a diverse set of systems that communicate with each other? I don't know and it is not relevant. If you're so inclined you may come up with another paradigm. Anyway, Pharo in particular is not such a paradigm, it's a fancy tool. Fancy, but a tool and it should behave as such and should co-operate, and it doesn't and that makes me very, very, very angry. And upset. And hurt. :-) > Alan Kay and some others have thought programming would be more productive if it took place at a higher level than manipulating text and files. I understand, but saying "text manipulation" is quite derogatory. It is _symbol manipulation_, that is what we are doing. The underlying mechanisms of the OS, filesystem and various media are irrelevant. What if I don't work with files, but "symbol maps" or whatever the F* some academic can come up with in his own custom fancy GUI tool. It doesn't change one bit. I still have to manipulate symbols and it still needs to be encoded somewhere. Increases on the fancy-dimension mean decreases on the is-robust-and-useful-in-a-general-way-dimension, not to mention the works-at-all-in-20-years-dimension. Text files are just low common denominators. They are simple to understand and work well, not only across space, but more importantly, time as well. > Well, ask someone with a lot of VB or Smalltalk experience how much the environment slows them down in comparison. Because you often hear the opposite. I know, but that's not the point. I'm not saying Pharo is bad at what it does, being an excellent IDE. It's wonderful. I'm opposed to the ideology of throwing away all UNIX lessons and integrating everything into one God-system. I guess I've upset not only the Smalltalk, but now also the Windows people. Sorry. > I guess debuggers, refactoring and class browsers aren't useful, then. These are aids, typically implemented graphically, but not always - Vim has excellent autocomplete, refactoring and class-browsing plugins. Yes, some tasks map excellent to the visual metaphor. Scanning hierarchies and seeing high-level overviews are indeed useful abstractions, but that is not the point. The point is that if you want an excellent debugger, use an excellent debugger. If you want a good refactoring tool, use a good refactoring tool. Don't throw it all in one system and call it a day. That is not the UNIX way and yes, I am saying that is the superior way. In all of its vulgar, plebeian ways, the UNIXes have stood the test of time and I'd seriously reconsider dumping that. ~ Angry, but generally peaceful if slightly anxious and over-caffeinated Engineer |
However, today's Pharo has made significant progress with interfacing to "foreign" stuff. The file system has become a first-class citizen of the environment. There is an FFI to work with C libraries. And of course support for network protocols. Source code management is based on Git. It's the GUI that remains in a world (window) of its own, but otherwise Pharo's system integration level is just a notch below languages such as Python or Ruby.