Hello! I don't know if this is a good place to ask this kind of questions, but I haven't found other places where Smalltalk/Pharo experts hang out.
I'm a designer and unfortunately I know nothing about programming and computation. I'm trying to change this right now. I'm looking for suitable technology to learn and so far Pharo/Smalltalk looks very promising. To be honest, it looks way too good to be true. And that's why I'm here, asking you guys to disillusion me. I work in a small department of a large company (unfortunately I can't give you too much details). Part of my job is to design tools that are used by our team. Every time I come up with an idea, we need to get a programmer from other department and we work together to bring my idea to life. So it would be perfect if I could do the programming on my own. We are lucky that we are not tied to any particular technology (at least in our department, for now). Some of our tools were written in Java, some in Python. After watching this video [https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=550] my imagination just went crazy. It looks like the Smalltalk system would be also a perfect tool to give presentations to my superiors. So to me Smalltalk looks like a holy grail. But again, my perception of it is probably wrong and I might be better of learning, for instance, Dart+Flutter. So here is a bunch of questions, I hope someone will find time to answer (and I do apologize in advance, as I'm sure you may find this questions infantile and annoying): 1. As a designer I'm an aesthete. Is it possible to change the look of the windows and the environment to ones liking? Or redesign the whole system to not use windows at all? How moldable the environment is? 2. How well is Smalltalk/Pharo suited to handle different graphic animation effects? As a designer I like to use animations to cue users. What about sound effects? Also, as a hobby I'd like to try some (3.) generative art and (4.) agent based modeling. Is Pharo suitable for this kind of things? >From what I saw and read it may be good choice for ABM, but some people cry about Smalltalk being slow. So maybe I'd be wiser to learn Processing (for 3) and NetLogo (for 4) instead. This would be unfortunate as these are two another technologies to learn. 5. And the last question- as I skimmed through "Blue Book" I found so called "Pen" class. However, it looks like it's missing in Pharo. Was it removed? And if so, why? I find the language itself, and especialy its minimalism/simplicity, so elegant, that I'm thinking of printing the famous "postcard example" and hanging it on a wall. The whole system, however, is humongous! It looks like learning (to be albe to do anything interesting and non-trivial) will take ages. So, what do you think? Should I invest my time here? Or is there a different technology that I should consider? Gustav -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
