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by john1203 783 days ago
It seems too research-oriented programming IDE+language, where there is not a big market compared to other areas.

Who does Pharo want to compete with? Maybe developers think they shouldn't compete with other platforms? With the amount of real Pharo apps right now even on GitHub, it would be extremely difficult to "sell" Pharo to any decision maker.
1 comments
cess11 783 days ago
Why would that be hard? Once you're fluent in it development in Pharo is very, very fast, you can build a GUI application while a prospect or customer is watching and supplying inputs about what they need.

Many companies that buy software don't care about programming languages, they care about functionality and price. With Pharo you can show them immediately what the application could look like and how their processes could be implemented. Fast development means you can sell at a lower price and reach customers that can't afford more 'classic enterprise'. You can also reach customers that do work in quickly changing regulatory environments, like insurance.

When you've banged out the frontend and some logic you return to your office and figure out things like database schema.

Pharo is specifically designed for commercial and industrial applications and not as a research environment. Partnering with private capital has been one source of funding for the project.

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john1203 780 days ago
>Pharo is specifically designed for commercial and industrial applications and not as a research environment. Partnering with private capital has been one source of funding for the project.

Does Pharo have a user base comparable to other programming environments?

If Pharo were really used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, it would be as popular as Python, Java or C++. And it is far from it.

I repeat, "Pharo is very, very fast, you can build a GUI application..." is not something that is sells today, and if it were so competitively, companies would use Pharo instead of Flutter, Swift, etc. and on a large scale.

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cess11 780 days ago
To me that reads like gibberish. Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java?

Pharo and other Smalltalks are used in ERP and similar systems. It's attractive if your business requirements change a lot and you either don't want or can't afford to employ a legion of Java developers. You could write to https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/ and ask why those logos are at the bottom of that page, now that Smalltalk isn't as popular as it would be if it was any good.

As a CTO I don't really care whether a programming language and toolchain "sells today" or whether it is "competitive" in some general, presumably universal, sense. I want tooling that fits the problem domain really well, and sometimes niche tools outperform general tools by a large margin for certain problems. They might require fewer developers, allow faster development or better scaling than e.g. Java.

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igouy 780 days ago
> To me that reads like gibberish.

Perhaps you could be more charitable in your reading.

> Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java?

Because those large-scale commercial and industrial Smalltalk applications are mid-1990s business-critical legacy systems!

"Over six months in 1996, Smalltalk’s place in the market changed from the enterprise darling COBOL replacement to yet another disappointing tool with a long tail of deployed applications that needed to be maintained. … the commercial Smalltalk vendors were unable to counter the Java hype cycle and development of new Smalltalk-based enterprise applications stopped. "

https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914

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cess11 779 days ago
No, I don't think I can.

You're answering a question I didn't ask, and quotes an article of dubious relevance.

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