"I am sure there will always be skeptics. But my own experience was
different. For me, the most weird thing about Squeak (and now Pharo) IDE
is its insistence in showing only one method at a time. A method is too
small a chunk of code. It is easy to miss the forest for the trees. In
Dimitris video, you see lots more code in one glance in vim session. So
there are pragmatic reasons why some coders fallback to using fileOuts
for browsing classes."

I could not agree more , I find the column GUI weird and a waste of space. This is why I have ended up relying a lot on GTSpotter (finder) which help me browse classes a lot faster than the class browser. Kinda ironic.

I am using Pharo since 2011. I am still dont like Class Browser :D

"In summary, if someone misses Emacs or Vim when working with Pharo, it could be due to:
- being stuck in the file-based way to think of coding.
"
Its a common misconception that Pharo does not heavily rely on text files, it actually does. Not only the source file makes it possible to view the code even the oldest method of version control tha Pharo being a fork, inherited from Squeak, the known mcz files they may look small binary files like the Pharo image but they are merely zip files with source code text files with the st extension.

The image is merely the bytecode, the VMs machine code sort of, the actually source works the same way as other languages. Like other languages you dont need the source code to execute , only the bytecode. What makes the image special is that its one file and its a memory dump which makes it easy to store both live code and live state. Which is very helpful, technically its mandatory for true live coding, but still Pharo has to rely on source code files to make our lives easy. From there on is just a question whether you break the source code files in several small ones, or keep one large.

"Besides that, is there an easy way to run an image in text-only mode, with a REPL or a playground or something like that?"

Yeap its possible and has been around for a very long time. Pharo also makes it dead easy to expose any method as command line argument, so its possible to code completely from the command line although definitely not recommended.

Deep Into Pharo book explains how.

On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 7:17 PM K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml@gmail.com> wrote:
On 24/01/19 9:47 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
>
>
>> On 24 Jan 2019, at 17:04, K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 24/01/19 7:23 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
>>> Everybody is of course totally free to do whatever they want,
>>> but really, why the hell would you want to do that ?
>> Because text has many uses other than just feeding into a compiler
>> for translation to machine code? People who come from Unix/Linux
>> world are used to using a rich collection of tools that deal with
>> text in various ways.
>
> I am myself a server/linux guy, an emacs user, I know what is all
> possible and what the unix philosophy is.


No offense intended. Just wanted to point out that text can have
different purposes. Historically, Smalltalk presented itself as a
OS+IDE. Today, that is no longer true. Pharo is just a multi-platform IDE.

> I also know how to integrate Pharo into that world, and this is super
> important.
Thanks. This is what I intended to bring out.

>>> You lose so much by doing that, I do not even know where to
>>> start.
>>
>> Live coding (i.e. coding in the presence of instances) is
>> undoubtedly more powerful than edit-compile-run cycle. Text is used
>> to direct IDE to edit live objects. But text has many more uses
>> than just issuing commands.�� If beginners start using vim just to
>> edit code due to established habits, they will soon realize the
>> ease of live coding and remain in IDE. This is a self-correcting
>> error.
>
> Well, I don't think so.
> The users that you are going to attract in this way (the ones that
> don't want to leave their own IDE/editor), will look at textual Pharo
> and find it very strange and ill suited to textual editing (and they
> are absolutely right), they will not discover the power, will not
> learn (from this experience alone) what object
> design/programming/power is, and will ask for more (e.g. give me ,
> style compiler errors, better/easier structure of the file, fixed the
> !! escape issue, etc, ...).

I am sure there will always be skeptics. But my own experience was
different. For me, the most weird thing about Squeak (and now Pharo) IDE
is its insistence in showing only one method at a time. A method is too
small a chunk of code. It is easy to miss the forest for the trees. In
Dimitris video, you see lots more code in one glance in vim session. So
there are pragmatic reasons why some coders fallback to using fileOuts
for browsing classes.

Regards .. Subbu