Well, one thing that might disappoint you in Pharo is UI libraries. You'd assume that system that has UI as integral part and relies on it would have excellent UI framework, but sadly that's not the case. Old framework - Morphic - is outdated; it's buggy, poorly documented, and its code is convoluted and hard to reason about. I'd say it has been abandoned (not supported) for the most part. New framework (actually 2 frameworks on top of each other) - Bloc/Brick - is not ready yet. Well, at least actual UI library (Brick). gustav_m wrote
Also, as a hobby I'd like to try some (3.) generative art and (4.) agent based modeling. Is Pharo suitable for this kind of things? From what I saw and read it may be good choice for ABM, but some people cry about Smalltalk being slow. So maybe I'd be wiser to learn Processing (for 3) and NetLogo (for 4) instead. This would be unfortunate as these are two another technologies to learn.
Pharo's performance is somewhere between classic interpreters (CPython, Lua, ...) and state-of-the-art JIT compilers (JavaScript V8, LuaJIT, ...). Whether it's slow is a matter of perspective. But 2 important thing should be noted: 1. If you are doing graphics stuff, a large share of CPU time is spent drawing graphic primitives, which is done using native library (e.g. Cairo) and has little to do with language runtime's performance. 2. To optimize performance, profiler is the most important tool. Pharo has built-in profiler that you can use for any code at any time (even profile all stuff that's happening right now). Processing IDE, on the other hand, doesn't even have a profiler. -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html