Hi Offray, Yes, I definitely agree with you that Lua does not have the nice development environment of Pharo (what other language does?), and is very bare-bones, as it was originally intended for embedded applications. I've gone through nearly all of the online version of the Pharo MOOC now, and the ease of building a web app with Pharo+Seaside is /amazing/. (That's reason enough to adopt Pharo!) I'm now looking at Spec and how to work with that to make GUI apps. I can't do web apps in Lua, nor is there a GUI in Lua.
For that matter, with Lua there is no interaction with the OS, no sockets, and very minimal file system interaction (that's actually built into Lua -- it doesn't even know what a directory is). All of these capabilities can be had in Lua, but they must be provided by external libraries -- even the ability to interact via a terminal command line is typically done via a small C app that wraps a Lua "state". Lua is tiny. Tiny, but powerful. So I see that as an advantage, and a compliment to Pharo. Seaside may be an external library to Pharo, but much of "the rest" is built-in, and comes with a nice OS/IDE to wrap it all up and keep things together. Did not Smalltalk-80 invent the concept of a container, which is becoming all the rage in IT today? Yet another first for ST..? So I guess that's my beginner impression of Pharo: a great environment that lives in a container. (I'm learning how to implement containers and implement /in/ containers now, too.) How easy is it to cross that boundary and interact with the rest of the world? Maybe another way Lua and Pharo are dissimilar? Example: I automate hardware... Can I use Pharo to interact with instrumentation over USB? -Ted Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote > Hi t, > > Yes, I know that Lua support OOP, with several implementations and using > metatables. I have not looked in detail. But the idea of shared > similarities while being at opposite extremes of the programming > spectrum/experience is more related with both sharing minimalist > concepts applied everywhere (objects and messages for Pharo, tables and > functions for Lua), but one provided a full IDE/GUI and being tied with > a programming paradigm, which makes it great for agile prototyping, > while the other offers just the bare minimum and you arm your puzzle > from there regarding tools, paradigms, which makes it great for embedding. > > Cheers, > > Offray -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
