I'm sorry, I've been turned off of pharo and smalltalk completely. Mostly due to the fact that I had it forced upon me for my Advanced Algorithms class. I don't like pharo, and I don't like smalltalk
Yup, I just wanted to spit my hate out because of the countless number of hours I've wasted using pharo and smalltalk in general. The images feel extremely fragile, the whole environment feels slow. Just scrolling in pharo eats up my cpu. Smalltalk may be an okay language (but extremely terrible to have to be mandatory for an advanced algorithms class), but pharo in my opinion isn't very good and just plain annoying. Also, for the record I've used pharo for two courses and I hated both courses with a passion just because I had to use pharo.
Have you ever used eclipse or netbeans? Those feels an order of magnitude slower than pharo. I consider pharo a small and fast environment compared to other "IDEs".
The point is I have a choice. I can choose to edit TEXT files in netbeans or eclipse, I can choose to edit them in vim or emacs. Using pharo and smalltalk I'm not even given a choice the environment is forced upon me and I have to use their specific environment.
thats why I still program in text files and use gdb for debugging. They are fast and reliable, that's what you need for algorithms anyway. And who cares about abstractions.
As someone in a corporate setup, used Pharo since three years as the introductory environment, I realize the pain he feels. It was really brittle for a newbie, it took a while for newbie's work with crashes, recovering code, red boxes with a cross over it, lack of decent FS access, lack of access to code snippets they could simply copy paste and feel good about having some working stuff. There are operations it was slow in..
I then focussed on principles of programming, OOPs, showed them the beauty inside Pharo, feel of the debugger, ironed out the issues they faced with stuff they should not do, how to quickly recover lost code etc..
Showed some cooler stuff like tablet like interface, new IDE interface for code browsing/ writing, interactive UI creation as quick hacked code in a day... that they experienced the difference from Java / C / C++.
Showed Groovy as the Smalltalking Java.. and why its even more cool in Pharo if they bite in deeper.
Even for algorithms, they picked up greater ability than they had in C, but despite it all, there is still peer pressure, some rough edges Pharo will probably take the year ahead to iron out. Then we can stem critical reviews of this kind naturally.
"Pharo-Smalltalk" is a nice, comforting IDE, platform and a language and should be as inviting, easy and natural language to everyone, which is the target the Pharo Team has in my opinion leaped over to since 2009 in great measure. More power to the team to do better in the year ahead.
I will try to do my bit in this year certainly to bring in the past years effort, refactored as required.
Love to see if we get the tide rising by next year, for hordes of converts and new developers.
That says more about the ability of your teacher or the fact that you have some kind of history of abuse by whoever than about the Pharo system.
I guess if he would have used Lisp, you'd dislike Lisp, if it was C++, you'd hate C++.
What are you using, out of curiosity?