I published What are the biggest myths about Smalltalk? <https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-biggest-myths-about-smalltalk-832a1c29f1ad> earlier this week. FYI, this person gave an account of his experience with Pharo <https://medium.com/@norman_kraft/i-guess-im-also-one-of-the-1-10-who-didn-t-like-or-get-smalltalk-f5ada176eaf8> . Here it is, verbatim:
I guess I’m also one of the 1/10 who didn’t like or “get” Smalltalk. I read through the same books Mortimer did, and spent a good six months trying to get even small projects in Smalltalk (Pharo) off the ground, and tried to get several of my developer friends to try out Smalltalk with me. I (and they) found little more than frustration as the reward. Packages and package management is a problem that can’t simply be dismissed. Monticello is not a good package system, half the time it failed when I tried to install libraries. And the failures gave error messages that were less helpful than a Java stackdump. The IDE is a bit mysterious. I know you find it simple to work with, but many don’t. There is a lot of clicking and window hopping, and I often found myself in the wrong window for what I wanted to do. There is simply too many windows in a small space and no clear tools to navigate the IDE as efficiently as other IDEs. Of course, I may be biased here: I do almost all my development in Emacs, but my friends were using IDEs like VisualStudio and NetBeans in their work and they also found the Pharo IDE clunky. Deployment is another serious issue. Deploying a Smalltalk image means installing the full image on a server and getting rights to run it. This reminds me of Common Lisp, which is a wonderful and much-loved language but is a pain to deploy in today’s security-conscious server world. Performance was another issue. My friends and I put together a web application in Seaside with Roassal, which was kind of fun to start but a pain to finish. We wrote another one in Java to do the same task, with the D3 JS library for data visualization. The Java web application was several times faster than the Pharo app in rendering visualizations and processing data throughput. When one of the applications crashed, the difference in error and crash handling between Java and Smalltalk was vast. Smalltalk is fun to play with, but I can’t think of a single secured production environment where I would use it. Maybe one day it will grow up to have bullet-proof libraries, a professional IDE and better performance but for now, it’s just a hobby language for me. -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
