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by devonrt 6029 days ago
It's funny because I had a really refreshing experience with Pharo lately. A part of the workspace threw an exception and I was presented with the option to debug it. Hitting debug brings up a debugger with the full stack available and the source of the error. Within a few minutes I was able to track down the error, fix it and have the fix go live immediately. Compare this to what it would take to debug and fix an error in, say, Eclipse. The difficulty of checking out the Eclipse source, dealing with potentially confusing and convoluted source code, wrangling with a labyrinthine ant or Maven build process etc. makes it not worth your while to fix the problem.

Whatever the pros and cons of the image based system may be the immediacy and transparency of it is really enjoyable. It's a shame that the idea has been pretty much abandoned by all but a small contingent of developers.
2 comments
mark_l_watson 6028 days ago
I agree on the goodness of image development. In the early 80s I had a Lisp Machine, and I would use an image for months before rebuilding it. Also, when I do Common Lisp using SBCL (not often), I have images pre-setup that I grow over time.

Unfortunately, my Smalltalk skills are weak, but it is a great language. About 8 years ago, I signed up as a Cincom Smalltalk VAR, spun up on it, but never had a customer want me to use it (except for Cincom itself: they paid me to rework some of the documentation).

Anyway, I just downloaded a Pharo + Seaside installer, and may play with it while visiting family next week.

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xtho 6028 days ago
> A part of the workspace threw an exception

Did this happen with the standard workspace as it was distributed? This typical smalltalk experience might be acceptable you. There is a chance though that your customers won't find it similarly enjoyable.

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devonrt 6028 days ago
For one, this was Pharo Smalltalk; a fork of Squeak that's still in beta. For another if I was shipping an application to a customer I probably wouldn't ship it with the workspace, or any of the development tools really. I would also consider buying a license for a commercial Smalltalk if that was the case.
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paulgb 6028 days ago
Pharo is still maturing, but I've encountered the occasional exception.
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protomyth 6028 days ago
No more so then a customer seeing an exception in a program written in C++.
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