As I started Smalltalk with Pharo 1.3, I may resonate with Dennis point of view.

Simple in syntax but not easy indeed.

There are ways to do things and smart ways that require a while to sink in.

Basically, it turned my mind upside down and I realised that a lot of things are easier to do in Smalltalk once you do it the Smalltalk way.

And I really love the minimalism of the syntax and the environment.

Heck, I chose to go with Pharo for my paying customers and it works fine.

This explaining that, I'd better have a working solution if I want to eat. This helps with the learning. Not sure I would have persisted if it was not the case though.

Phil

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 7:01 PM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:

2014-06-19 16:44 GMT+02:00 Dennis Schetinin <chaetal@gmail.com>:

Simple ~= Easy.
Smalltalk is simple (simpler then most of other PLs), but it's not easy (to understand and master, especially after other PLs).��

Intersting...
I'm certainly too biased after all these years of Smalltalk, but I would have thought the exact contrary...
What exactly isn't easy in Smalltalk versus other PL?

Is understanding and mastering C++, lisp, haskell, whatever, simpler than Smalltalk?
Or do you only mean that difference between any two other languages is less than difference to Smalltalk?

��
--
Best regards,

Dennis Schetinin
2014-06-17 11:59 GMT+04:00 kilon alios <kilon.alios@gmail.com>:
personally I don't like this postcard , it looks too much like "snake oil marketing" to me.��

It creates the illusion that Pharo is much simpler than other programming languages as a programming language while nothing can be further from the truth. The idea here is to prove to the viewer that Pharo is based on a very simple recipe and that is of course true. But if we have to be honest is should come with a disclaimer for the potential users that Pharo is no blue pill and there tons of things outside this postcard you need to learn if you want to create the simplest Pharo application. I will be frank , as a language I dont find Pharo any simpler than let's say python , which I am more familiar with. And the fact that there is this simple recipe gave me zero benefits to me so far. Its a cool trick that may come handy down the line if I want to shape the language more to my needs, but I dont see doing this to a day by day basis.

Now a "living coding postcard" stating the workflow of Pharo and demonstrating the power of the debugger is much more honest and frankly better marketing for Pharo. You show something to a person that will benefit his workflow on a day by day basis.��
On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 10:32 AM, Yuriy Tymchuk <yuriy.tymchuk@me.com> wrote:
Now, who is creative enough to add ��dynamic array�� (one with curly braces) and temporaries in a block to the original thing:
exampleWithNumber: x
    | y |
    true & false not & (nil isNil) ifFalse: [self halt].
    y := self size + super size.
    #($a #a "a" 1 1.0)
        do: [ :each |
            Transcript show: (each class name);
                       show: ' '].
    ^x < y
Uko

On 16 Jun 2014, at 15:35, Oscar Nierstrasz <oscar.nierstrasz@gmail.com> wrote:

I got it from Stef, who always said it came originally from Ralph Johnson.

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SmalltalkSyntaxInaPostcard

Googling around finds various copies of this, but no original source.

Oscar

On 16 Jun 2014, at 10:58 , Yuriy Tymchuk <yuriy.tymchuk@me.com> wrote:

I guess it��s here: http://files.pharo.org/media/flyer-cheat-sheet.pdf

I think that it would be interesting to put the syntax on a postcard. It can work as a proof of concept, some addition cheat-sheet for newcomers and also as some king of souvenir.

Uko

On 16 Jun 2014, at 10:36, stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:

you have the flyer of Damien (no idea where it is) but no real postcard.

Stef

On 16/6/14 09:35, Yuriy Tymchuk wrote:
Hi guys,

we all are talking about the syntax fitting in a postcard, but was there any real postcard with Pharo syntax prototype? This would be really interesting.

Uko