[blihp]

I've been using various Smalltalk dialects (Squeak/Cuis/Pharo) for over a decade. I've gone a bit off the deep end and use it for prototyping pretty much everywhere I can.

Pharo would be the one Smalltalk environment I would not use for non-toy stuff because it has historically been so unstable. This is at least somewhat by design since the developers have always stated they didn't want to be constrained by backwards compatibility... and they have never let themselves be. It's a great environment for playing around with ideas, not for developing code you expect to work as is a few years from now without some (potentially serious) work. In fairness, all the Squeak dialects have this issue to varying degrees. It just seems to me that it's more extreme with Pharo.

[seandenigris]

Due to Pharo/Smalltalk being not just a language, but a language/libraries/IDE, I think it's important to distinguish between API instability (which IHMO is better called evolution) vs. bugginess. API evolution is a core part of Pharo's mission. I've personally upgraded projects from Pharo 1.x all the way to Pharo 7 and have been very willing to trade a small amount of effort porting for big increases in productivity.

[alxndr]

> I've personally upgraded projects from Pharo 1.x all the way to Pharo 7 and have been very willing to trade a small amount of effort porting for big increases in productivity.

Wow, any chance you've written about the upgrade process?

[seandenigris]

I don't exactly have a playbook. I generally just fix as I go. I try to install the project, fix any errors, run the test, fix the errors, etc. I can say that some version jumps have been almost no work and probably the max time I've spent is an hour to get everything working. It used to be a bit harder, but nowadays Pharo has automatic refactoring for deprecated methods, which helps...