I just started playing with it a day ago. From what I can tell, its a cleaned up, slimmed down squeak intended for serious webapp development. The problem with squeak is its not "accessible" as a serious programming platform. It has too many toys and the morphic stuff needs to be "toned down" as its just too different from our everyday desktop experience. I'm guessing pharo is trying to correct that and also give you a slimmed down platform for deployment as well. I'll keep watching this project to see if it takes off. I was a serious smalltalker many years ago. In terms of an accessible toolset, IMO opinion, the best one was killed in 1996 (Digitalk's Visual Smalltalk "Team"). Sure, IBM's (VA now at Instantiations) and ParcPlace's (now Cincom) are solid environments. But for me, I have never felt at home with those tools. Lets hope Pharo gets it right so I can use Smalltalk again. As a starting point for you, here is what I did just yesterday: 1 - download the latest "dev" one click installer. Its not really an installer, you just download, un-zip and launch the VM. 2 - go to http://builder.seaside.st/ an click on the "Development" link near the top. After all the check boxes get selecetd for you, go to the bottom of the page and select the link "Load script". Take this load script and drop and drop it on your running Pharo dev vm and it will install Seaside for you. That's cool!!! thanks, Jon On Jan 4, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Sean Allen wrote:
I started using Squeak a few months ago, mostly in a time permitting fashion.. 2-3 weeks ago, I saw a Pharo related message come across that list and joined here to see what Pharo is. I'm still not entirely sure, so I'm asking...
Pharo is... ?
The little bit of marketing on the website makes it sound appealing and I'm sure if I had more experience with Squeak then downloading the one click and running it and poking around would have answered a ton of questions but, I don't have the Squeak background to have that be meaningful.
Is there a document somewhere that says what Pharo is meant to be. What initial concrete changes from Squeak where done/are going to be done? I really need something as a jumping off point...
Thanks for any pointers, Sean
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