| I would lend a little credence to his statement. 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. |