Hello! I don't know if this is a good place to ask this kind of questions,
but I haven't found other places where Smalltalk/Pharo experts hang out.
Perfect place here. You can also use direct for more chatty interaction.
I'm a designer and unfortunately
Cool, I personally think we miss designers :)
Me I���m a mechanical engineer at first but then assistant professor that is more into information systems now.
There are lots of computer scientists here, mostly. One difficulty was not smalltalk but the whole universe of programming concepts I had to learn...
I know nothing about programming and
computation.
Not a problem. Thats might be better too to learn Pharo/Smalltalk in general as people having habits in other classical programming languages have their habits (file bases vs. image based).
I'm trying to change this right now. I'm looking for suitable
technology to learn and so far Pharo/Smalltalk looks very promising. To be
honest, it looks way too good to be true. And that's why I'm here, asking
you guys to disillusion me.
I won���t as I���m literally addicted ;-)
The rough edges are we are a small community, hence, even if supportive, you won���t have all libs working fine out of the box.
I work in a small department of a large company (unfortunately I can't give
you too much details). Part of my job is to design tools that are used by
our team.
Proptotyping ? Or doing real ones ?
What kind do tools ?
Every time I come up with an idea, we need to get a programmer
from other department and we work together to bring my idea to life. So it
would be perfect if I could do the programming on my own.
Yes at least you could prototype stuff. But this takes time too, so you���ll have to see if your management allow that.
We are lucky that we are not tied to any particular technology (at least in
our department, for now). Some of our tools were written in Java, some in
Python.
After watching this video [
https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=550] my
imagination just went crazy. It looks like the Smalltalk system would be
also a perfect tool to give presentations to my superiors.
So to me Smalltalk looks like a holy grail. But again, my perception of it
is probably wrong and I might be better of learning, for instance,
Dart+Flutter.
So here is a bunch of questions, I hope someone will find time to answer
(and I do apologize in advance, as I'm sure you may find this questions
infantile and annoying):
1. As a designer I'm an aesthete. Is it possible to change the look of the
windows and the environment to ones liking? Or redesign the whole system to
not use windows at all? How moldable the environment is?
Moldable hum funny.
Look at glamorous toolkit which is based on Pharo (for now) and a new way of thinking the IDE + more than that. Moldability is a central concept for them.
Also, we often use web interface. There is the great Seaside framework for building complex web apps. I personally prefer marshaling apps based on web services and alike. Zinc is a great internal framework.
If you want native windows for desktop app, there is a not yet finished but actively developed GTK bindings that allows you to have either windows inside Pharo (SPEC) or natively depending on your OS (with GTK).
2. How well is Smalltalk/Pharo suited to handle different graphic animation
effects? As a designer I like to use animations to cue users. What about
sound effects?
Sounds I don���t know but that certainly doable. For animation at least you should look at Roassal3.
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?
Cool :)
From what I saw and read it may be good choice for ABM, but some people cry
about Smalltalk being slow.
It was slow in the 80���s. :)
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.
I had to use NetLogo recently and whereas it���s a nice piece of software, I can tell you that I miss my pharo environment once it come to debug and fine tune���
There is also an ABM in ST, called Cormas that is ported to Pharo (right now).
5. And the last question- as I skimmed through "Blue Book" I found so called
"Pen" class. However, it looks like it's missing in Pharo. Was it removed?
And if so, why?
The blue book is about ST80. Pharo is a descendant, not a lot in common, at least in the design- and the librairies. You won���t find it.
I find the language itself, and especialy its minimalism/simplicity, so
elegant, that I'm thinking of printing the famous "postcard example" and
hanging it on a wall. The whole system, however, is humongous! It looks like
learning (to be albe to do anything interesting and non-trivial) will take
ages.
Indeed it can. Step learning curve. Especially to be able to navigate, browse, etc��� but once this step is achieved, this really becomes a joy.
So, what do you think? Should I invest my time here? Or is there a different
technology that I should consider?
You may be quicker productive in other environment, you���ll find probably more example to copy-paste adapt��� but if you can grasp the smalltalk philosophy, you may be doomed and addicted for ever and learn a lot during the journey (a real investment for me) ;-).
Take some time to explore and do net get frustrated if not all is working out of the box.
Look at the book here :
I really like all but a particular mention to:
hth, and welcome again,
C��drick