Dear all, I've been using Squeak before, now I'm using Pharo. Its still 'hobby' usage. However, on my firm, we have a lot of working groups in which we investigate new technologies. We mainly use Java / .Net. I've initiated a working group around Smalltalk/Seaside. And chose Pharo as a smalltalk platform/dialect, mainly because its free and adaptable. I'm a fan of it, but my colleagues of it have some doubts about it. I know that its not finished yet, and that a lot of improvements are ongoing. The main 'complaint' about Pharo is that the environment is not stable. In a lot of the tools you get exceptions, errors, it breaks something, stuff like that. Thats a shame off course. I expect in an environment that everything just works. We are using Eclipse in our day to day work; nowadays, Eclipse is quite fast and is reliable. Pharo is more or less fast enough, but still not reliable. There are too much 'dead links', messageNotUnderStoods I mean. For instance on latests browse package is not working on the Class Browser. On the Pharo 1.0 branch, there are also dead links here and there.
So therefore my question: I highly support that Pharo wants to innovate ; BUT as a developer I first expect that every tool works perfectly, that I can trust it. Furthermore, since Smalltalk environment is written in itself, I expect that every tool is also thoroughly unit tested to avoid regression on the tools. I don't know if it is possible to test the Morphic windows in Pharo. Rephrasing: I think we should focus a lot on making the current system stable, and keeping it stable; and focus on fixing bugs asap (and not just quickly fixing the bug, first at least write a test for it). All these new stuff like NewCompiler, Settings, in the 1.1 are very valuable stuff to add; but we should really keep focusing on stability. I'm saying this because, what I've noticed is that my colleagues are trying the other smalltalks like Cincom; the only reason that that they are doing this , is because the environment is not stable enough: I suspect that a lot of other people are also doing this? I've noticed that there are quite some regression bugs (for instance: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=349); it worked in version x but now is not working anymore. If you have a lot of these, you lose a lot of time. I'd rather make one slow step forward, instead of rushing forward and having to back up. Furthermore I still had some other tools I found very useful in my day to day work that I'm missing in Pharo - Proper keyboard shortcuts: see other thread, did not have time yet to put something on wiki - History of a file: you can always check the local history of a file (comparable with the versions of a message in Pharo), but you can in the same view also see the version of the file on the repository - regardless which versioning system you're using. And quickly open these versions, select 2 of these versions and compare them with each other. This is very valuable tool if you're developing with a lot of people on the same to see every version created and quickly be able to compare them. Is there such functionality in Pharo ? - ... Any thoughts on this? Kind Regards, Bart -- imagination is more important than knowledge - Albert Einstein Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere - Albert Einstein Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Albert Einstein The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. - Albert Einstein Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. - Albert Einstein
_______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
