Posted by Ben Coman on Aug 08, 2014; 2:53am
URL: https://forum.world.st/Two-Questions-from-a-Newbie-tp4772384p4772406.html

kilon alios wrote:

Fortunately Smalltalk is a never ending journey into the land of weirdness and Pharo is its champion. Pharo is by far the most actively developed open source Smalltalk out there. Most likely more actively developed than the commercial ones too. So the overlap is pretty minimum actually. 

Smalltalk is not a programming language. Its a live coding environment that has also a very minimalistic language. Yeap documentation is a big problem in Pharo. I was complaining about it a few days ago. However people here are very helpful and very friendly to newcomers (unlike other programming languages ) and stackoverflow questions never go unanswered so you are not alone and people can help a lot. So its not that bad. Also there is already a lot of documentation about Pharo. Pharo for The Enterprise , Pharo By Example and Deep Into Pharo should keep you occupied for months if not years. 

As a newcomer its important to keep an open mind, Pharo is actually easy to learn but unlike other programming languages is not the same thing repackaged diffirently . Its quite diffirent actually and I think that is what makes it so productive and fun. 

In any case the secret of learning is very simple ... ask and you shall receive ;)

Oh and welcome to Pharo .And remember if you are not having fun then its a Pharo bug and you should report it ;D

*grin* I like that a lot. It made me laugh.  It almost would go well on the web site somewhere.

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Ichiseki <[hidden email]> wrote:

Konnichiwa
First thanks to those that gave me some directions to start with Pharo /
Smalltalk.
Now I have some questions that I'm sure are very stupid.
The first one is, is there a way to use the bouncing atoms and the lights on
on Pharo 3? Because I tried to build it in there and it doesn't work

I guess you are referring to Pharo By Example.  I strongly recommend that use the Pharo Image that was used when the book was written, so that the screen shots match.
http://pharobyexample.org/image/PBE-OneClick-1.1.app.zip

kilon is kindly putting effort into updating PBE to Pharo 3 but I'm not sure of the status.
https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/UpdatedPharoByExample

The second one is why there are like three different smalltalk environments?
Pharo Squeek and Cuis? What are the differences? Is there a standard? I find
this extremelly intriguing as it seems like there is a lot of dupplicate
effort?

You might also ask why there are several different C programming environments - gcc, LVMM, Eclipse, Visual Studio
The answer is that philosophies differ.  Pharo and Cuis are forks from Squeak.  To over simplify... Squeak has several major community projects built on top which value the stability of their platform.  Over many years Squeak has grown and evolved in tandem with those projects and is strongly coupled to them.  Someone wanting to develop new projects on top of Squeak viewed parts of that as bloat, but for those existing projects it was essential behaviour.  There have been many contributors over the years, and as a large system there are parts that hard to support.   So those wanting to make Squeak leaner, more modular and cleaner for better long term support forked Pharo from Squeak.  Now Squeak is also progressing in these directions, but without the constraint of those existing projects Pharo can be more aggressive.   To me it comes

The third one is which is the line between the core language and frameworks
and libraries in Pharo?

That is a very good question and one we should probably work of defining better.  Many frameworks and libraries are part of the environment delivered by Pharo, and personally I think of the whole package "as Pharo".  I had a hunt around and maybe [1] gives a good summary of the core language itself. Now Smalltalk has been a continual evolution from the 1970s. Squeak and Pharo are directly descended from Smalltalk-80 [2].   In 1998 ANSI Smalltalk [3] defined a core language and libraries for half a dozen commercial vendors, but of course the trouble with standards is they dull innovation, and Pharo seeks to go beyond.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmalltalkTutorial
[1] stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf
[2] http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/uploads/172/standard_v1_9-indexed.pdf
[3] http://www.eli.sdsu.edu/courses/spring01/cs635/readingSmalltalk.pdf

I found that, for instance Cuis has something like a basic image and some
external frameworks, pharo has some internal frameworks and lots of
externals. This is weird from someone comming from other languages.

Could you provide some non-weird examples form other languages?

One of the great advantages of Smalltalk is working in a live Image.  However this can be a disadvantage in terms of reproducibility and dependencies forming between frameworks. Pharo seeks to break this by separating frameworks out of the Image, to provide a minimal Image and a means of automatically loading frameworks back in via continuous integration. 

The fourth is I found that documentation is very, very scarce especially for
some frameworks. This is also a major drawback for a newcomer to pharo. A
very thick entry barrier.

We need to do better here.  Are there any particular frameworks that you are looking at?
cheers -ben

Thank you
Ichiro




--
View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Two-Questions-from-a-Newbie-tp4772384.html
Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.