Hi Bart, Thanks for the feedback. You make some good points. If you want to help make Pharo better, please report bugs! Stability is important for us. That is why we have a 1.0 that is stabilizing, and a 1.1 alpha branch at the moment. We don't just commit everything into one trunk... After 1.0 is released, there will be maintenance updates for important fixes. Cheers Adrian On Dec 18, 2009, at 09:41 , Bart Gauquie wrote:
Dear all,
I've been using Squeak before, now I'm using Pharo. Its still 'hobby' usage. However, on my firm, we have a lot of working groups in which we investigate new technologies. We mainly use Java / .Net. I've initiated a working group around Smalltalk/Seaside. And chose Pharo as a smalltalk platform/dialect, mainly because its free and adaptable. I'm a fan of it, but my colleagues of it have some doubts about it. I know that its not finished yet, and that a lot of improvements are ongoing. The main 'complaint' about Pharo is that the environment is not stable. In a lot of the tools you get exceptions, errors, it breaks something, stuff like that. Thats a shame off course. I expect in an environment that everything just works. We are using Eclipse in our day to day work; nowadays, Eclipse is quite fast and is reliable. Pharo is more or less fast enough, but still not reliable. There are too much 'dead links', messageNotUnderStoods I mean. For instance on latests browse package is not working on the Class Browser. On the Pharo 1.0 branch, there are also dead links here and there.
So therefore my question: I highly support that Pharo wants to innovate ; BUT as a developer I first expect that every tool works perfectly, that I can trust it. Furthermore, since Smalltalk environment is written in itself, I expect that every tool is also thoroughly unit tested to avoid regression on the tools. I don't know if it is possible to test the Morphic windows in Pharo. Rephrasing: I think we should focus a lot on making the current system stable, and keeping it stable; and focus on fixing bugs asap (and not just quickly fixing the bug, first at least write a test for it). All these new stuff like NewCompiler, Settings, in the 1.1 are very valuable stuff to add; but we should really keep focusing on stability. I'm saying this because, what I've noticed is that my colleagues are trying the other smalltalks like Cincom; the only reason that that they are doing this , is because the environment is not stable enough: I suspect that a lot of other people are also doing this?
I've noticed that there are quite some regression bugs (for instance: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=349); it worked in version x but now is not working anymore. If you have a lot of these, you lose a lot of time. I'd rather make one slow step forward, instead of rushing forward and having to back up.
Furthermore I still had some other tools I found very useful in my day to day work that I'm missing in Pharo - Proper keyboard shortcuts: see other thread, did not have time yet to put something on wiki - History of a file: you can always check the local history of a file (comparable with the versions of a message in Pharo), but you can in the same view also see the version of the file on the repository - regardless which versioning system you're using. And quickly open these versions, select 2 of these versions and compare them with each other. This is very valuable tool if you're developing with a lot of people on the same to see every version created and quickly be able to compare them. Is there such functionality in Pharo ? - ...
Any thoughts on this?
Kind Regards,
Bart
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