kilon alios wrote:
No offense intended but lately the more I dive inside Pharo the more I feel I waste my time, I love the IDE and the environment and live coding but using the libraries is a never ending struggle for me. I agree with Nicolai the landscape is not good, Pharo really lacks mature libraries . Sure we like to bash Java but Java libs are rock solid and very well documented. I bring Java as example. Again I am not complaining at all, I knew when I came to Pharo that I will have to face these limitations. I also don't feel comfortable asking questions all the time as if I want others to do my code but I did not have much of a choice. I just cant deal with the lack of documentation any more.

You demonstrated your willingness to contribute and I think that goes a long way to balance any number of questions. Now you should appreciate that asking questions actually shows someone making use of a library, which can be good thing for a developer.�� And as ESR says [1], "The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. [...] If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise."��

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html���� (yes I know, my favourite again)


I think Pharo as a general idea is great , you definitely have taken the Squeak fork one big step further but you have a very long road ahead of you to make Pharo a modern environment. Asking for animating a window with good performance is one of the very basics of a good GUI API. I know you have limited resources and once again I am not complaining at all I just present my opinion. Its clear that Pharo needs a lot more people to contribute and bring the system forward at least to solve the basic problems.

Thank you all people who helped me. But I don't think it worths to make my project in Pharo, too many problems. ��I feel privileged to have helped you with my contributions , I wish the Pharo the best.

I can definitely understand with your main interest being an existing application like Blender written in C, then developing in C may give you the greatest power. Good luck with it!


I could return back to Python but I think its time for me to bite the bullet and learn C/C++, since graphics is an area that deeply interest me (more as an artist less as a coder), so I don't have much of choice. Maybe I can brings some of my code back to Pharo with NB wrappers , I definitely will keep a close eye on Pharo.��

In a few months I will also present to the Pharo community a secret last contribution ;)��


I have really appreciated your enthusiasm, your joy of Pharo, and your honest constructive criticisms.�� Sometimes it can be suspect that Smalltalker fanbois are blinded by their world view, but as a newcomer to Pharo your positive comparisons of Pharo versus languages-you-knew-better were a�� nice validation of Pharo, even if there remain things to improve. Now life is a long and winding road, so maybe opportunity will arise sometime for you to use Pharo again.�� I hope you have fun in the meantime!

btw, just a parting thought that I had regarding your requirement.�� Rather than trying to do your Blender graphics rendering on top of some layer in Pharo, you might** use OSWindow [2] to create a native-window-canvas that you pass to Blender for it to render directly into.�� As I understand it, you could then build a Pharo base GUI around that window.�� Now if that happened to be possible, your dive into programming Blender in "C" would probably be of great benefit.�� Maybe something to come back to later.

**Disclaimer, I haven't used OSWindow. Its just an intuitive thought.
[2] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~OS/OS-Windows���� (scroll down to "The Windows User Interface" and "Graphics")

cheers -ben