Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming
For those who don't know what I am talking about, there are several families of languages where the state of your program is kept within an image. The upside of this is that you can integrate everything together in a really neat way and build neat tooling with introspection. The downside is that you have just made what's going on not visible from the filesystem, and have to replace all of the tooling that you're used to. You know, things like your favorite editor, command line programs, source control...
If you switch languages regularly (which most developers do in my experience), being able to use your favorite toolset everywhere turns out to be more important than being able to build an ideal toolset for only one language.
I independently arrived at the same conclusion. The main problem with Pharo is the esoteric tooling; life is too short to struggle with tools.
That said, I consider Smalltalk, Objects and Design by Chamond Liu to be one of the best books I ever read on the subject of object oriented programming. Heartily recommended.
And I actually find things like Spotter, Code Rewriter, GTInspector and Calypso pretty neat.
IntelliJ is not simpler and is closed source. It is neat, true. We even use its icons in Pharo.
And that's the problem. The tools are different. They require learning. And once learned, they are only useful for dealing with one language. And that is a language that nobody around me uses.
The result is a barrier to entry. A barrier to entry of a type that I'm not bothering with again unless I have a good reason to.
Furthermore the small size of the community means that I am unlikely to get to choose tools that fit me. I'll be stuck with whatever the personal preferences were of the people who wrote the tooling. Even if I like them, my neighbor probably won't.
You bring up IntelliJ. However I don't use IntelliJ. I prefer vi and command lines. The guy sitting across from me likes Visual Studio. I couldn't tell you how many other IDEs are in use by programmers in the same space as me. No single toolset is going to be to all of our tastes. And it doesn't matter with a filesystem based language, because we are each free to use whatever we want.
User experience is one area where Smalltalk seems like it could use some focus on. Compare the screenshot of the system browser on pharo.org compared to figure 17.1 (page 293, PDF page 315) of the "blue book":
http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pd...
Apparently that layout was perfected in 1980. Has anyone ever experimented with showing more than one method at a time in a window? And taking up less screen real estate with the class hierarchy? Seems ripe for some new thinking here.
And working on a fuse thing that exposes my running image as a filesystem so that I can such tools as well.
But saying that the tools are different and you cannot be bothered to use them? Look, Visual Studio is a monster beast, with tons and tons of features, including Azure ones. It takes a serious while to master.
And vim also takes a serious while to use well. Especially when we use a couple of plugins.
An engineer knows the tools. Then a specialist masters them. The master makes them. Or changes them.
Pharo allows one to do that. Without strings attached.
The benefits of learning a particular tool are essentially proportional to how often you use that tool. The greater flexibility of other tools such as vim means that the cost of learning it can be amortized over essentially as many projects as you wish. The costs for learning Pharo tooling are only spread over as many Pharo projects you do. If you don't believe you'll be doing all that much in Pharo, it makes it a fairly daunting proposition to invest that time.
But Pharo is all about the deep integration of the tooling. Its what facilitates such a tight Code->Compile->Run->Debug cycle. It can take a while for the penny to drop. If you do a drive-by taste of Pharo you probably didn't get chance to really get into the flow.
Some say... "The only programming languages worth learning are those that change the way you think about programming." And Pharo/Smalltalk tooling does that.
Smalltalk is much more than the OO model.
On the other hand if your intent is to learn about its collection classes, what MVC looked like in its original inspiration, and so on, then you should learn Smalltalk.
There is more to learn than any of us has time for. If you know what you hope to get out of learning something like X, then you should pick the most convenient X around to learn it.
While Pharo (and Squeak, etc.) have baked in editors and source control, Pharo has integrating with general tools as a design goal. It includes an integrated Git client and can load packages from or move them into a Git repository.
Integrating with general tools may be a design goal. Yet it clearly isn't fully there. A filesystem based language does better without even trying.
Iceberg is breaking new ground compared o Kraken/SourceTree etc.
Pharo took the risk of integrating git support in the tools.
It takes a few iterations.
So what? Either one is a user or one is inventing new stuff. When was it you wrote a full wrapper for libgit? And made it available to any app? Yes, any Pharo app now has the ability to use libgit features. Awesome and opening quite some doors.
All developers are users of someone else's software and knowledge. I'm OK with that, and happy to not reinvent perfectly good wheels. You go ahead and enjoy wrapping libgit.
My preference is to understand how to use data to help businesses. For example a decade ago I gave a tutorial on A/B testing which resulted in multiple companies adding many millions to their own bottom line.
It is a big world. There is room for all kinds.
Nobody forces one to use Pharo and I actually find it indeed useful to have an FFI binding to libgit.
Pharo has had git support for years with git filetree. There is no urgent need for a built in tool. Iceberg is an integrated tool which is not even yet released for the version of Pharo it is intended for (7).
The project is useful to test drive UFFI significantly. As such it is a really good test bed for all kinds 7of data structures and callbacks etc. Coupled with the 64 bit VM + image it is even more so.
I am in the Pharo ecosystem as a long play. Expedient solutions are plentiful. But they all lack this QWAN in Pharo that makes it enjoyable to me.
I am interested in understanding how things do work. Pharo allows me to do it in a way that suits me.
Given the count of "me" above, it is clear that I follow my own path and I couldn't care less about popularity.
Truth be told, I find it somewhat useful to have a harder to approach community. It keeps the signal to npise ratio at an acceptable level.
Yes, I'd like a cookie. But not for libgit, but libstrophe. It was easier (and clean!) to bind with Pharo than with a lot of other technologies. The ability to pin objects is also very usable.
Whoever designed the GUI also probably never used even git, or they couldn't stand their own tool. From the top of my head: 1) it shows all commits in a linear list (with broken unicode) completely ignoring branches 2) deletions are green and additions red.
https://johnkoerner.com/csharp/the-c-interactive-window-in-v...
Previously there was the Immediate window but it is limited:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f177hahy%28v=vs.110...
btw, see the section here on "Blub Paradox" (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ) which means I'm not really competent to comment of C#'s dynamic objects.
It seems C# work by subclassing the DynamicObject class. What about dynamically extending all the other existing C# classes?
What if I subclassed a C# Queue as MyQueue and then while my days long simulation was running I wanted add an instance variable 'trackCount' to all existing MyQueue instances? In Pharo all you do is this...
Queue subclass: #MyQueue instanceVariableNames: ’trackCount’ classVariableNames: ’’ poolDictionaries: ’’ category: ’Example’
and program keeps running, this definition is updated in the editor.
I find little point in learning Smalltalk today, except maybe read a ten minute article to check out its odd syntax.