I am looking at Pharo to evaluate whether it can be used for a
mid-size commercial project. The system will use Seaside. I have
looked at Pharo 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2.

I am impressed by the work done so far. Pharo looks and feels a lot
better than Squeak, and a lot of enhancements have been done since the
project started. There are however a few issues which hold us back
from using Pharo, listed (in decreasing importance) below:


1 - Package Management

From what I have seen so far, the concept of “packages and categories”
is confusing. We are used to VisualAge and VisualWorks, which clearly
shows the structure of packages in the browsers. In Pharo we cannot
find browsers which give us the same overview. We are uncertain how
packages are made and how they show up in Monticello. At one point we
thought category == package, but that seems not to be correct. We note
that method extensions are possible, but we also struggle to
understand all aspects of them.

I notice that a “Package management system” is in work, so hopefully
this area will improve.

2 - Dependency Management between Packages
Since we are unable to organize our code in packages, controlling and
verifying dependencies between them is hard. But from what I
understand, there are not many tools for controlling that packages do
not break dependency rules.

3 - Name Space Support
I understand name spaces will not be supported any soon. We have a
project with thousands of classes, and name space support would be
nice to have.

4 - Break Point Support
It would be better to have break points, than having to insert code
like “self halt” into the code.


Is there any reason to believe Pharo will improve to meet our
requirements? Did I misunderstand some aspects of Pharo, or are there
tools which can solve what we see as shortcomings?

Kind regards
Runar Jordahl

_______________________________________________
Pharo-users mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-users