2014-04-28 23:48 GMT-03:00 Sean P. DeNigris <[email protected]>: > Esteban A. Maringolo wrote >> Plays well with "choose your favorite text editor" (Sublime, Vim, >> etc.) and IDEs (RubyMine, etc.), with source control systems (any file >> based system), with unix in general (several cli commands), has >> binding for any major/mainstream library* (databases, network, etc.). > > But again these boil down to community size/interest > - To use "your favorite text editor", Craig Latta serves Smalltalk via > WebDav [1], but who has jumped at this opportunity? > - source control - now that there is community interest, progress on git > support has been moving ahead rapidly with minimal resources
This is my point, who uses WebDAV as its file support? It is a "workaround" to enable file based development. A VERY CLEVER one, but still. > - unix in general - with FFI and OSProcess, what can't you do? Are we > talking about the lack of cool Ruby backtick syntax? While definitely cool, > that special-purpose syntax is the kind of cognitive load Smalltalk > overcomes. All those little syntactical twists and turns to remember lead > away from "syntax on a T-shirt" to manuals with hundreds of pages I'm not talking about syntax, and I wouldn't trade Smalltalk syntax for anything else. FFI and OSProcess IS NOT unix interoperability, are ways to get "out" of the image (the island in Byte's '81 cover). Think about this... Windows and Unix/Linux culture. One started from an "all windows" architecture, whilst the other was the other way around. Windows is still thriving to get a command line culture for many of its products. Only in the last years they've been adding more and more features through command line, because of the demand of scripting and who knows what else. And maybe that "command line" need comes from people coming from the unix world. And, to me, this is "playing well with others", not being able to call "external" programs via any mechanism. I think that one big part of the success of Mac notebooks in the developer community, is the fact is has an underlying unix. Oversimplified example: You don't need a version of gzip with bindings to tar in order to have both working together. > - bindings - again, obviously just a question of community size and interest Here I agree. That's why I asked if you would recommend Pharo today to somebody who has current needs. > So the "play well with others" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are no > bindings because there are no people to write them because there are no > bindings... I have to agree with you about the self-fulfilling prophecy. > At inception, Ruby (and every other language) didn't have those bindings > either. Ruby got to be what it is because of Rails. Because of 37signals. Pharo doesn't have that. It could have happened with Seaside. But it didn't. It worries me that when an outsider pinpoints so clearly what are our weak points we can't think outside of our box. Proportions aside, it remembers me when you talk with a 100% minded PHP programmer about something, and they can only think inside of their box, and instead reply that you can do OO in PHP and you don't need an interactive debugger.:) Having all that said, I still bet on Pharo. :) Regards, Esteban A. Maringolo
