What are the biggest myths about Smalltalk?

I published  What are the biggest myths about Smalltalk?
<https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-biggest-myths-about-smalltalk-832a1c29f1ad>  
earlier this week. FYI,  this person gave an account of his experience with
Pharo
<https://medium.com/@norman_kraft/i-guess-im-also-one-of-the-1-10-who-didn-t-like-or-get-smalltalk-f5ada176eaf8>
. Here it is, verbatim:

I guess I’m also one of the 1/10 who didn’t like or “get” Smalltalk. I read
through the same books Mortimer did, and spent a good six months trying to
get even small projects in Smalltalk (Pharo) off the ground, and tried to
get several of my developer friends to try out Smalltalk with me. I (and
they) found little more than frustration as the reward.

Packages and package management is a problem that can’t simply be dismissed.
Monticello is not a good package system, half the time it failed when I
tried to install libraries. And the failures gave error messages that were
less helpful than a Java stackdump.

The IDE is a bit mysterious. I know you find it simple to work with, but
many don’t. There is a lot of clicking and window hopping, and I often found
myself in the wrong window for what I wanted to do. There is simply too many
windows in a small space and no clear tools to navigate the IDE as
efficiently as other IDEs. Of course, I may be biased here: I do almost all
my development in Emacs, but my friends were using IDEs like VisualStudio
and NetBeans in their work and they also found the Pharo IDE clunky.

Deployment is another serious issue. Deploying a Smalltalk image means
installing the full image on a server and getting rights to run it. This
reminds me of Common Lisp, which is a wonderful and much-loved language but
is a pain to deploy in today’s security-conscious server world.

Performance was another issue. My friends and I put together a web
application in Seaside with Roassal, which was kind of fun to start but a
pain to finish. We wrote another one in Java to do the same task, with the
D3 JS library for data visualization. The Java web application was several
times faster than the Pharo app in rendering visualizations and processing
data throughput. When one of the applications crashed, the difference in
error and crash handling between Java and Smalltalk was vast.

Smalltalk is fun to play with, but I can’t think of a single secured
production environment where I would use it. Maybe one day it will grow up
to have bullet-proof libraries, a professional IDE and better performance
but for now, it’s just a hobby language for me.



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Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html