Re: [Pharo-dev] The Dilemma: Building a Futuristic GUI for Ephestos

[Ben Coman]

kilon alios wrote: No offense intended but lately the more I dive inside Pharo the more I feel I waste my time, I love the IDE and the environment and live coding but using the libraries is a never ending struggle for me. I agree with Nicolai the landscape is not good, Pharo really lacks mature libraries . Sure we like to bash Java but Java libs are rock solid and very well documented. I bring Java as example. Again I am not complaining at all, I knew when I came to Pharo that I will have to face these limitations. I also don't feel comfortable asking questions all the time as if I want others to do my code but I did not have much of a choice. I just cant deal with the lack of documentation any more. You demonstrated your willingness to contribute and I think that goes a long way to balance any number of questions. Now you should appreciate that asking questions actually shows someone making use of a library, which can be good thing for a developer.  And as ESR says [1], "The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. [...] If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise."  [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html   (yes I know, my favourite again) I think Pharo as a general idea is great , you definitely have taken the Squeak fork one big step further but you have a very long road ahead of you to make Pharo a modern environment. Asking for animating a window with good performance is one of the very basics of a good GUI API. I know you have limited resources and once again I am not complaining at all I just present my opinion. Its clear that Pharo needs a lot more people to contribute and bring the system forward at least to solve the basic problems. Thank you all people who helped me. But I don't think it worths to make my project in Pharo, too many problems.  I feel privileged to have helped you with my contributions , I wish the Pharo the best. I can definitely understand with your main interest being an existing application like Blender written in C, then developing in C may give you the greatest power. Good luck with it! I could return back to Python but I think its time for me to bite the bullet and learn C/C++, since graphics is an area that deeply interest me (more as an artist less as a coder), so I don't have much of choice. Maybe I can brings some of my code back to Pharo with NB wrappers , I definitely will keep a close eye on Pharo.  In a few months I will also present to the Pharo community a secret last contribution ;)  I have really appreciated your enthusiasm, your joy of Pharo, and your honest constructive criticisms.  Sometimes it can be suspect that Smalltalker fanbois are blinded by their world view, but as a newcomer to Pharo your positive comparisons of Pharo versus languages-you-knew-better were a  nice validation of Pharo, even if there remain things to improve. Now life is a long and winding road, so maybe opportunity will arise sometime for you to use Pharo again.  I hope you have fun in the meantime! btw, just a parting thought that I had regarding your requirement.  Rather than trying to do your Blender graphics rendering on top of some layer in Pharo, you might** use OSWindow [2] to create a native-window-canvas that you pass to Blender for it to render directly into.  As I understand it, you could then build a Pharo base GUI around that window.  Now if that happened to be possible, your dive into programming Blender in "C" would probably be of great benefit.  Maybe something to come back to later. **Disclaimer, I haven't used OSWindow. Its just an intuitive thought. [2] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~OS/OS-Windows   (scroll down to "The Windows User Interface" and "Graphics") cheers -ben