[HN Gopher] Pharo 8.0
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Pharo 8.0
Author : estebanlor
Score : 167 points
Date : 2020-01-20 13:24 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pharo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pharo.org)
| zerr wrote:
| vm doesn't start on Windows - "Unsupported 16-bit Application".
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I haven't checked out Pharo 8 yet, but found Pharo 7 to work
| well on Windows.
| elliotlarson wrote:
| As a long time Ruby developer I frequently hear older developers
| talking fondly about their experiences working with Smalltalk
| long ago. When I saw this post, I was curious enough to watch a
| video just now by a respected Ruby dev (who's admittedly new to
| Smalltalk and using an older version of Pharo):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o. The video is short,
| but it looks to me like the advantage of developing in this
| environment is mainly that you can write a test, run it in a kind
| of debug mode, and when the environment encounters something it
| doesn't understand it gives you some options for creating
| something new like an object or a method to solve the problem.
| This seems kind of cool, but I feel like there must be more to
| it. Can anyone better explain the selling point, or share a video
| that highlights how this environment is so cool?
| xkriva11 wrote:
| http://pharo.org/features
| zerr wrote:
| Pharo always looks cute, but does anyone here use it, even for
| toy stuff?
| bjoli wrote:
| Writing small web services in seaside has been like living in
| the distant future since something like 2006. JavaScript made a
| lot of strides towards making seaside less impressive in recent
| years, but as someone who hates frontend stuff I still vastly
| prefer it.
|
| Playing with it in 2006 was like using magic. Sure, it is not
| REST, but whenever I show it off to someone used to handling a
| lot of stuff client side they still have to pinch themselves :)
| echelon wrote:
| I once interviewed a candidate who decided to use Pharo to
| solve my technical problem. It was an absolute joy to see not
| only a good approach, but such an interesting and alien
| language employed to solve it.
|
| He got the job. :)
| fmakunbound wrote:
| Yeah, I use it. It is a highly productive development
| environment. My daily work is Java, C#/.NET, Angular, React,
| but when I'm in deep in the zone, in Pharo, developing web
| applications, those other platforms and tools looks like
| monkeys throwing turds at each other.
| eitland wrote:
| It is not Pharo but I work with what is possibly (probably?)
| the largest group of smalltalk programmers in Norway.
| armagon wrote:
| "The future is already here - it's just not evenly
| distributed." - William Gibson
|
| I did some work in Smalltalk (working on a mod of Scratch 1.4,
| which was written in Squeak Smalltalk from the turn of the
| century). Once you got used to it, it was amazing. The
| environment is lively, and you can debug into everything.
|
| The tech is great; it is just that the community of people who
| know it is relatively small. If you wanted to develop an open-
| source project in it, you may have a harder time finding other
| developers to help.
|
| On the other hand, if you wanted to make a cross-platform
| desktop application that doesn't look native (which, given the
| prevalence of Electron, doesn't seem to matter too much to
| people), this would be an excellent choice.
|
| I wish I could do more development with Pharo. I also think the
| web framework Seaside would be fun to work with.
| http://seaside.st/
|
| We just need to go back in time to twenty years or so and take
| a different fork ...
| Allower wrote:
| Seems fairly dead, the examples certainly don't work or are
| missing entirely.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| I also thoroughly enjoy Seaside. There's also
| https://iliadproject.github.io/ for another approach.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| Iliad says Latest commit 0be1977 on Jul 18, 2017. Seaside
| says last commit 24 August 2019. Any actively maintained
| web framework that will work with Pharo 8?
| e12e wrote:
| > if you wanted to make a cross-platform desktop application
| that doesn't look native
|
| I'll just mention that the announcement (which is now down)
| and the readme mentions spec2:
|
| > Spec 2 (preview) - UI building framework with multiple
| backends
|
| The announcement (main hn link) mentioned spec2 and native
| look together.
| klez wrote:
| > On the other hand, if you wanted to make a cross-platform
| desktop application that doesn't look native (which, given
| the prevalence of Electron, doesn't seem to matter too much
| to people), this would be an excellent choice.
|
| Yeah, as if people are going to install a whole virtual
| machine to run a chat application...
|
| Wait...
| protomyth wrote:
| Yep, it still amazes me how a lot of the criticisms of
| Smalltalk have been become the new, cool solution.
| Smalltalk on Electron would be an interesting answer.
| armagon wrote:
| That'd be funny.
|
| I'm sure you could do it with https://www.amber-lang.net/
| ;-)
| dgellow wrote:
| The website has a "Stories" section: http://pharo.org/success
|
| Projects screenshots look way better than I expected.
| Zenchess wrote:
| I always use smalltalk when the problem would allow for it
| since I'm much more productive in smalltalk than anything else.
| It's great for certain random tasks - i.e. Want to set up a
| websocket server for some reason? Program it in smalltalk, test
| it interactively (literally debugging on execution errors,
| fixing and resuming execution until it works).
| If I'm writing a native windows app I'll go with dolphin
| smalltalk which imo is much nicer to work with and gives you a
| native gui. I have to say though pharo is getting better all
| the time and has an active community.
| fooblitzky wrote:
| I use it, mostly for toy stuff (work is 80% Java).
|
| Once you get used to it, Smalltalk is really the most amazing
| development environment. It's hard to describe how it feels to
| work with live objects - it's an incredible speed boost,
| because instead of grepping logs or stepping through code, you
| just interact with the objects directly, you can examine the
| state of instance variables, add new methods, or change code
| while the code is running. The feedback loop is so short, you
| get amazing productivity.
|
| There's a great video floating around somewhere of someone
| debugging an Asteroids game while the game is running.
|
| From what I've read, the downside is that working on larger
| programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more
| communication to keep the code base consistent and structured.
| arnsholt wrote:
| I worked on a large legacy application (in production since
| 1996) implemented in Smalltalk for a couple of years. I don't
| feel we had any particular issues keeping the codebase
| consistent due to _Smalltalk_ itself (there were some issues
| due to the Smalltalk system 's version control system which
| was pretty terrible), but Smalltalk enabled us to implement
| new features in the application very smoothly, and debugging
| issues was simply a joy compared to other systems I've worked
| in. Finally, we could also fix bugs in the _platform itself_
| , which was quite useful since the vendor stopped supporting
| this particular Smalltalk compiler around 2000; I did a
| couple of small but quite important fixes like this while
| working on the project.
| protomyth wrote:
| Are you using VSE? I've wondered what happened to all the
| folks on it. I assumed most converted to VisualWorks, but
| it would be interesting if Pharo becomes an option.
| arnsholt wrote:
| Yeah, VSE is the culprit. I think the main reason the
| application was never moved off VSE is that the
| application is developed by a consultancy firm (my
| employer at the time) for a public-sector client, and the
| leadership of the client isn't interested in investing in
| long-term stuff for this particular program, they'd
| rather try to get an extraordinary allocation on the
| order of a few hundred million USD and do a massive, more
| buzzword-compliant rewrite of a big portion of their
| application portfolio. Never mind that the application in
| question is strategically important for their ability to
| do their job and it's already suffering under a rather
| long period of under-funding and general mismanagement
| from the client's side. Replacing VSE would have been
| nice, Pharo even better (but then you need to do
| something about almost 25 years of GUI made in
| WindowBuilder...).
|
| The funny part is that even though VSE isn't a very good
| Smalltalk, it's one of the most productive environments
| I've ever worked in.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _From what I 've read, the downside is that working on
| larger programs in a team is challenging. It takes a lot more
| communication to keep the code base consistent and
| structured._
|
| I don't think that's an inherent limitation of image based
| development -- just that the current systems don't offer
| facilities for syncing etc.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| Maybe grandpa already knows, but in Pharo's case, there is
| Iceberg. It's a Git interface that's included in default
| Pharo images that understands Pharo's packages, and so on.
| You can push your stuff to Github etc. and teams can work
| together that way.
|
| I've never worked in a team in a Pharo projects, but I
| imagine it works well somehow. There's ~75 contributors to
| the 8.0 release.
| m4r35n357 wrote:
| website down?
| m4r35n357 wrote:
| Seems to be back . . . but slow. No gone away again! Might try
| again tomorrow.
| estebanlor wrote:
| our server is having problems handling the traffic :( But try
| again later, you will not regret it!
| the-dude wrote:
| Seconded
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Needs 2 reloads. Then its there.
|
| Edit: maybe try https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-
| changelogs/blob/maste... ?
| 7thaccount wrote:
| It is extremely slow even during non HN events unfortunately.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > This page (http://pharo.org/news/pharo8.0-released) is
| currently offline. However, because the site uses Cloudflare's
| Always Online(tm) technology you can continue to surf a
| snapshot of the site.
|
| Except that I see a big error page.
|
| Isn't CloudFlare supposed to help with this? The message on top
| seems to indicate that, but when I (back in the day) tested
| with CF on my domain it just proxied every request and failed
| when my server didn't respond, having zero advantage over just
| using my server directly (in fact, even having the downside
| that Tor users now couldn't reach my site anymore). Seems like
| that's still the case.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Who runs the Pharo site? Let's try to diagnose and help them.
| I don't actually believe in the hackers news hug of death,
| since many sites survive it just fine (because they take
| "static content" as seriously as one needs to in order to do
| so). I see that pharo.org has a "login" link at the bottom.
| Could the homepage be doing an auth cookie DB lookup on each
| pageview?
| singlow wrote:
| It is optional to let CloudFlare cache the content. I believe
| you can control it from the CloudFlare control panel as well
| as affect it from your HTTP headers. So I bet they have the
| feature enabled on the panel but their HTTP headers tell
| CloudFlare not to cache the page, maybe accidentally.
| drivers99 wrote:
| It is caching the static assets (js, css, png, etc) based
| on default extensions[1]. The page itself is dynamic,
| likely for the comment feature at the bottom of the page.
| If they wanted to cache it, they could probably add some
| caching headers (have to change the responses on the
| origin) or a Page Rule in cloudflare (and not have to
| change anything on the server). But that won't be a good
| idea if people can login to the page to comment (not sure
| if CloudFlare can tell if someone is not-logged-in and
| return a cached version; that would be interesting). I see
| CF-Cache-Status: DYNAMIC header, which is:
|
| "The resource content type was not cached by default and
| your current Cloudflare caching configuration doesn't
| instruct Cloudflare to cache the resource. Instead, the
| resource was requested from the origin web server. Use Page
| Rules to implement custom caching options."
|
| [1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/200172516-U...
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yeah, it's like that every single time it shows up, I really
| don't understand what this is supposed to do.
| atemerev wrote:
| So, still no HiDPI/Retina support. This is probably the most
| requested feature since at least Pharo 4, and nobody seems to be
| interested in implementing it.
| as1mov wrote:
| > This is probably the most requested feature since at least
| Pharo 4
|
| I don't see any page where it says this is the most requested
| feature. If it was, it would've been developed by now.
|
| It's kinda funny, few hours ago there was a post on the
| frontpage by burntsushi on the terrible way FOSS developers are
| treated. And here we have a live example of the usual drive-by
| commenters who take one glance at the project and decide their
| own niche requested feature is the most important one.
| elliotlarson wrote:
| This is the first thing I noticed when I opened it up. Whoa,
| fuzzy text, no retina support? I'm guessing this isn't
| important to the Pharo developers, or at least, it isn't a top
| priority for one reason or another. I guess I'm a bit of a
| resolution snob. I find it off putting. But, hey. It's open
| source.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| I'm on a retina mac, and it looks like this
| https://imgur.com/a/iSkHMlJ text rendering-wise. Maybe it's my
| middle age eyes, but it looks fine to me???
| elliotlarson wrote:
| Yeah, to me it's noticeably different. But, like I said
| elsewhere, I think I might be a resolution snob.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| The Pharo window is significantly pixelated in comparison to
| the browser window on the left
| badsectoracula wrote:
| If it is the most requested, then perhaps one of those
| requesting it should try to do it themselves? HiDPI support
| sounds like a high effort low reward task (according to this[0]
| HiDPI monitors practically do not exist in the wild and chances
| are none of the main developers have one), so unless someone
| who really wants it puts the effort themselves it may take a
| long time to appear.
|
| Generally speaking unless there is a big company behind the
| scenes that pays the developers for an open source project, it
| doesn't matter how many people ask for something if the
| developers themselves aren't interested in working on it and
| your best bet is to do it the old fashioned way (yourself :-P).
|
| [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
| stats/desktop/w...
| atemerev wrote:
| Every Macbook after around 2015 is HiDPI. Windows Surface
| laptops, too. Hardly "practically do not exist in the wild".
| I love Smalltalk, but I am not qualified to rewrite the
| entire Pharo rendering layer, unfortunately.
|
| Also, statscounter doesn't account for high resolution
| displays at all, grouping them all as "other". And these are
| around 20%.
| owl57 wrote:
| I'm curious if it is even more misleading. Does it count
| 3840x2160 with 2x scaling as "other" or "1920x1080"?
| mgamache wrote:
| Don't forget the Dell XPS line (which is popular with dev
| types). I am working on a three year old XPS 15 with HiDPI
| zamadatix wrote:
| How is a table of resolutions supposed to tell you anything
| about DPI? A 640x480 screen can be high DPI while a
| 3840x2160p screen standard DPI. Or the other way around. Or
| neither. Or both. It depends on both resolution AND physical
| size.
|
| It'd also be interesting if they were even checking physical
| resolution or virtual (scaled) resolution.
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(page generated 2020-01-20 23:00 UTC)