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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone familiar with both Squeak and Pharo could give a brief comparison between them, or link to one?

I don't have a specific goal in mind but have always been interested in Smalltalk, and am not sure which one to try out. Thanks!

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Squeak is the original descendent from Smalltalk-80, where they used the last good image as a starting point for a bootstraped implementation of Smalltalk-80.

Pharo started as a kind of Squeak fork, where they wanted to pursue other ideas related to JIT, GC, compiler technology, traits and so on.

So basically both are Smalltalk-80 implementations, with Pharo trying to be a more modern version of it.

Thanks for the info! Very interesting about bootstrapping from the last good image. An old friend of mine (now retired) was involved in Squeak from before the beginning, and this reminds me that I've been meaning to catch up with him. I bet he has some interesting stories.

I tried out Squeak about ten years ago, but never could get past the awful bitmap font. Naturally, the first thing I noticed on the Pharo page was that the fonts look nice! So I installed it on my WQHD ThinkPad to try it out.

The first thing I noticed is the way it responds to the TrackPoint. It is not like any other application I have ever used. Instead of letting Windows control the pointer position, it's doing something very different, I just don't know what.

It's not so bad with the touchpad, but I don't use the touchpad except for scrolling.

It doesn't support high DPI either, so the text is all blurry. Way better than the old Squeak bitmap fonts, though.

I don't want to sound like a complainer, it just wouldn't be pleasant to program in this environment when every other app and dev tool I use supports high DPI and correct TrackPoint response, both on Windows and Linux.

The next-gen graphics system for Pharo, called Bloc, is still under development but making good progress. If you can find some of the demos [1] you'll see that things like text rendering are vastly improved.

[1] https://twitter.com/AliakseiSyrel/status/1050781535983550464

As I understand it, pharo was squeak. But squeak with etoys was very much aimed at children - pharo was a fork to make a more "serious" open/free smalltalk. Since then the projects have moved forward together - and apart. Sharing advances (like new VM) where it makes sense.

But I'm sure there are people that know more on here. Like Alan Kay, for example :)

It sounds like Pharo is the one for me to start with, thanks!

There are a things in it that are not in other Smalltalks (e.g. slots, revamped streams, GToolkit).

The point is to be a system to be improved over time.

Squeak is more conventional I'd say.

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