Guys
We love all your ideas and feedback. Now do you have an idea of the ratio
Intelligent vs Pharo
Eclispe vs Pharo
in terms of payed engineering time?
Stef
On Jan 12, 2013, at 1:19 AM, Ben Coman wrote:
> Frank Church wrote:
>>
>> Hi Igor,
>>
>> I am new to Smalltalk but not new to programming and I am into my
>> first 14 hrs into learning it with Pharo.
>>
> Good to have you on board Frank. It will be interesting to follow your
> experience in becoming proficient in Smalltalk & Pharo. I am just coming up
> on a year of using Smalltalk/Pharo. There are a lot of hidden depths and I
> learn a lot watching the mail list for answers to questions that I hadn't
> thought of asking yet. So fire away.
> I'll just mention a few things that I have learned that make it easier to
> plumb the system for examples.
> Also see http://marianopeck.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/pharo-tips-and-tricks/
>> As I was trying to work out the right syntax it brought to mind the
>> thoughts of Brendan Eich, Gilad Bracha and Lars Bak who said the
>> familar syntax (Algol/C style) of languages like Javascript, Go and
>> Dart was chosen to make it easier for programmers familiar with C,
>> Pascal etcetera to starting using. them, rather than learn a whole new
>> paradigm, even at the cost of complicated parsing and language
>> structure.
>>
> The flipside is that it makes it easier to continue operating with your old
> paradigms in a hybrid manner, preventing you gaining the most 'stretch' most
> from a new paradigm.
> That is a very personal choice depending on what you want to gain from new
> learnings. However the main paradigm shift of Smalltalk is not its syntax
> but its 'live environment'.
>> If I was using Eclipse IDE for instance, at every step I could use
>> auto-completion and the documentation to decide what follows from
>> what, even in a domain I had no familiarity with, but Smalltalk
>> doesn't lend itself to that approach.
>>
> I was going to just ask for some examples of what you particularly liked in
> Eclipse. We can learn from other systems. However with a quick browse I
> found [1]. Do you have anything to add to that?
> [1] http://eclipse.org/recommenders/documentation/usr.html
>
> A few thoughts in response...
>
> _Intelligent Code Templates_ - "But code templates /really/ shine when
> developers have to use APIs they are not very familiar with. Then, code
> templates serve as additional documentation that quickly shows how an API can
> be used and save developers lot of time otherwise needed for reading API
> documentation. Eclipse maintains more than 70 of such Java code templates"
>
> Within Smalltalk, rather than 70 templates you have the whole system. If you
> are browsing a class and see a method which seems like what you want, click
> <Senders> to get an idea of how to use them. Another way to learn the system
> is to temporarily edit any method to insert a 'self haltOnce' then
> 'World-menu > System > Enable halt/inspect once' which will bring up a
> debugger where you can explore the call chain to see a live demonstration of
> how that method is used. The reason to use #haltOnce rather than #halt is
> that method might be used by the display system and you wold end up locking
> the image with cascading halts as the display loop runs. Using halos, you
> can <Duplicate> that menu item and leave it sitting on the background as a
> button for easy access.
>
> You can highlight any method and use <cmd-n> or <cmd-m> to get a list of
> senders & implementors of that method. I often find myself following
> several levels to understand a chain of calls.
>
> Learn the difference in using the <Into> <Over>& <Through> buttons when
> debugging (eg from the Workspace context menu) something like '#(1 2 3 4) do:
> [ :x | Transcript crShow: x].' For quite a while I had missed using
> <Through> properly which hamstrung me when tracing code and not wanting to
> trace the machinery of how #do: worked.
>
> _Intelligent Overrides Completion_ & _Subclassing Directives_ & _Self-call
> Directives_
> These look interesting, in particular if they bought up examples from public
> repositories outside the image.
>
>> With spoken languages even without proper syntax or phrasing a person
>> who knows the language can deduce what you are trying to say but with
>> computers you either get it right or the computer stares back at you
>> blankly.
>>
>> As an experienced programmer I am trying to accomplish something
>> non-trivial as hard and as fast as I can with Squeak, Pharo and their
>> supporting libraries and ecosystem and the only way is to bombard the
>> mailing lists and forums. You could say I am trying to understand how
>> the language constructs can support my intentions as fast as I can.
>>
>> With respect to the above I can truthfully say that at this juncture I
>> don't know what it all means, from the theoretical view point, nor
>> from the practical perspective of what I am trying to accomplish,
>> which is why the questions are flying in so thick and fast.
>>
>>
>> Last of all - teachers please, I don't want to go to Smalltalk
>> kindergarten. I have done too much programming in my life to be put in
>> kindergarten when I start Smalltalk.
>> The problem here is although one can learn from reading examples, it
>> can be hard to understand the language constructs unless they are
>> derived from one's own use cases, and this is why my questions have
>> been coming in so thick and fast.
>>
>>
>>
> Even in light of that wanting to use your own use cases, there is one example
> I would recommend [2] - since it is the best demonstration I've seen of the
> paradigm shift of programming in Squeak/Pharo's live environment. It is not
> entirely trivial - it took me a couple of days to get through it - but the
> main reason I recommend it is that it is more than a code example. It is a
> demonstration the power of the system to refactor as the design evolves from
> concept to deployment. The author exposes errors in design and how best to
> use the debugger. Kind of a "this is how things are done in Smalltalk".
> YMMV but I personally found it useful to help me change my approach from
> previous programming languages. It is actually one of the main things that
> mad me focus more on Smalltalk. You would need to temporarily regress a few
> years to use Squeak 3.9 to match the article, then come back to use the
> latest and greatest in current Pharo.
>
> [2] http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/index.html
>
> cheers -ben
>
