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by melvinroest 1136 days ago
IMO it's a good tool for web scraping. The reason: you can do web scraping with Parasol (i.e. Selenium [1]) and then if you need visualization tools then you can immediately use Roassal [2]. The thing is: Pharo and the fact that it's more GUI-oriented than other programming languages, allows for data visualization a bit easier. Also: you don't need to know database specific. You can just store the data and save the image. Super useful for small web scraping projects.

Another use-case is: open-source software where you want to encourage users to just open up "the damn code engine" and hack straight into it, seeing it change on the fly. Like, can you just right click in Windows on a pixel and change the code that underlies it? In Pharo you can! Commercial parties would find this horrible, but it's amazing for full open-source software. Note: I don't think any other language is capable of this!

For web apps, B2B works quite well. B2C, I see scalability issues.

[1] https://github.com/SeasideSt/Parasol

[2] https://github.com/ObjectProfile/Roassal3