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by igouy 1438 days ago
> fast virtual machines

Compared to what? To do what?
1 comments
Qem 1438 days ago
Well, compared to popular dynamic languages with similar levels of abstraction, like Python or Ruby. Squeak was just released with SistaV1, so I think the speculative inclining JIT is just around the corner. While using Pharo, I'm used to get code running 2-3 faster than the equivalent in Python.
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igouy 1438 days ago
> popular dynamic languages with similar levels of abstraction

JavaScript?

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worthless-trash 1438 days ago
Man i wish I could really understand pharoh.
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nickd2001 1437 days ago
The freely available book "Pharo by example" I found good to learn from, a few years ago. Smalltalk is an enormously powerful language but initially it can feel "the wrong way round" like driving on the other side in a foreign country . You can get used to that though, and its worth it. I think in the years since I learned Smalltalk via Pharo, its got a bit bloated with features, so Squeak might also be worth a look for trying out simple things to learn.
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worthless-trash 1436 days ago
Thank you for the advice, I'll look into it.
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znpy 1438 days ago
one of the most annoying things about smalltalk/pharo is that the "marketing" tell you it's simple and the syntax fit in a sheet of paper, yet all the times i tried to try it i had to go through a lot of pharo introductory tutorial before i could even start to type an "hello world".

needless to say I got bored ad moved on.

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igouy 1437 days ago
With any programming language there's a lot of introductory tutorial before we even start to type "hello world".

    ~$ ./visual ./visualnc64.im -nogui -doit "Stdout nextPutAll: 'hello world'; cr. ObjectMemory quit"
hello world

    ~$
— or something like —

    $ cat hello.st
    Stdio stdout 
        nextPutAll: 'hello world'; 
        nextPut: Character lf.!
    SmalltalkImage current snapshot: false andQuit: true!

    $ bin/pharo --headless Pharo10-SNAPSHOT-64bit-502addc.image hello.st
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scroot 1438 days ago
`Transcript show: 'Hello, World'`

Not especially complex syntax. It just doesn't have a lot in common with languages with Algol-like syntax

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