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Comment by amjith | Hacker News Reader

There are some excellent screencasts for pharo here:

http://www.pharocasts.com

Smalltalk is a small language (think C), so you can learn the whole language set in a few days.

The live objects concept might warp your brain a little bit. I've heard lisp does the same, so if you're from a lisp background, you might not find it shocking.

The Pharo environment (IDE) can make all the modern IDEs (Eclipse, Visual Studio) look like babies in diapers.

There is built in versionsing, DVCS, refactoring tool, unit testing framework, The most powerful debugger etc....

You will not regret trying out Smalltalk (maybe you will when you have to go back to C++) :).

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In general I agree, except for the IDE part. Every single IDE I haven ever used have better editor that Smalltalk IDE.

Not being able to use your own editor, whichever it is, and being forced to use something that is basically equivalent to plain old browser textarea is a showstopper for calling Smalltalk environments pleasant.

Maybe Gnu Smalltalk is a cure to that, since it doesn't have live image and you can use whichever editor you like, but that kinda defeats most of the benefits of Smalltalk.

> that is basically equivalent to plain old browser textarea is a showstopper for calling Smalltalk environments pleasant.

That's hardly an apt description. My Smalltalk environment has intellisense, auto-complete, syntax highlighting, and automated refactoring. I use Pharo.

True. I've had trouble with that as well when starting up. But later on I found I'm not writing methods that are larger than 10 lines (longest being 20 lines) in Smalltalk, which makes it tolerable. Still no ideal.

I hear that SqueakVM has a package called nvi that can emulate Vi keybindings as well as emacs keybindings.

Squeak and Pharo used to have a really great (for some value of "great", anyway) Vim emulator you could use in place of the default editor, but the hacks to enable it ran so deep that it doesn't run well anymore. The good news is that Pharo's GUI is increasingly clean and less crufty, which ought to make reintroducing a similar package feasible for the first time in years, if anyone were up to it.

It should be possible to simply embed or shell out the editing to an external program… I think this'd be the ideal solution.

Back in the day QKS Smalltalk Agents had a really nice IDE. (90s). Wonder what happened to QKS ...

> Smalltalk is a small language (think C), so you can learn the whole language set in a few days.

Hm, not sure about that. The language itself (as in: syntax) is indeed minimal. It is much smaller than C, not even having ifs and whiles but this only means you have to learn the relevant part of the runtime to start using Smalltalk.

Fun fact: if in Smalltalk is a pair of virtual methods on the Boolean objects. True implements ifTrue as "always execute the argument" and False as "ignore the argument" and it's the other way for ifFalse.

I agree with the rest of your comment - it is definitely worth trying.

I think it means that there's a small set of concepts (and accompanying syntax) that open up the whole environment to you.

Compare it to what you need to know about Java or C++ to understand all of a codebase in that language.

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