[offray]

Your comparison of Pharo/Smalltalk with Unix is pretty accurate and is the one much people misses, comparing Pharo with other computer language, without taking into account all the companion tooling to make such system work: debuggers, editors, DVCS, graphical toolkits and a long etc. A more detailed explanation of how Smalltalk compares to the whole Unix environment can be found in "Tracing the Dyanbook"[1], but goes in the same route as you (with a pretty detailed philosophical, educational and historical view of the Smalltalk/Dynabook approach about what computing could be).

[1] https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831...

So Pharo/Smalltalk can be orders or magnitude less complex that a full OS and yes is running inside one, but for me that means that it gives you a unified way of dealing with environment/OS complexity (mostly incidental) by providing an interactive, live, supporting place to thing about your prototypes. I made Grafoscopio[2] using Pharo, after trying the Operative System approach and translating symbols to files and dealing with that mismatch and with a plethora of (incidental) complexity (See [3]). Despite of being a Unix/Linux user since 20+ years and a novice coder at that time, the feeling of empowerment provided by Pharo compared to the tools I was using in Linux before was pretty big.

[2] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html [3] http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/grafoscop...

I'm glad you have decided to test the tool by yourself and I highly recommend reading [1] for a deeper understanding on how Unix and Pharo/Smalltalk compare to each other and how the last implodes complexity, even when living inside the first one.

Cheers,