

What are the biggest reasons for not using Smalltalk? - horrido


======
csdcasder
I use Pharo as my primary personal projects development language (Racket is a
close second). What slows me down is the lack of documentation. This has had
the effect of making me seriously consider contributing to the project, given
time and energy of course.

I am building several small web applications based on Seaside, JQuery,
Bootstrap and SQLite. With very cheap hosting (e.g., Pharocloud, DigitalOcean)
I am planning to throw lots of these things up and see which ones stick. I
like this strategy better than the usual start-up strategy of spending lots of
time and energy on one thing at a time. With Pharo, this is comparitively
faster - reuse is easy, deploying an image is easy, and building apps with
Pharo is easy. I love Pharo.

------
dottrap
Coincidentally, there is another thread going on right now, "A Eulogy for
Objective-C".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003438)

Since Obj-C is considered a descendent of Smalltalk, it's pros and cons are
briefly mentioned as to the motivation behind Obj-C.

Here's an excerpt:

    
    
        But there was a problem, once again, with this idea of the whole image that took over everything. You had to really swallow the whole Smalltalk build, you had to go all the way in to this world, and you were going to give up everything you had ever done before to become part of the Smalltalk image. Then, when you were done, you would ship this image to people, they would start it up on their computers, and it would take over everything.

------
mtmail
No enough jobs in the market. Of the 800+ posts in this month's who-is-hiring
thread none mentions Smalltalk. I can imagine you were hoping for insights
into the syntax, data structures, speed or available library but for a lot of
people job prospects/making money will be a reason not to start to learn or
use Smalltalk.

------
gaze
I enjoy the interactive development experience, but the idea of stashing all
this code around a running system in a large team in a way that makes it hard
to tell exactly what you have strikes me as dangerous.

------
mindcrime
I poked around at it in the past, and the biggest impediment I found was the
need for opaque and specialized development tools. This may not be universally
true, but from what I saw, most Smalltalk environments require you to use
their specific IDE/editor, and then it saves your code in some proprietary
(binary?) format. So it's not as simple as just editing a file with Emacs or
Vim and running

#> smalltalk myfile.smtlk

or whatever.

Beyond that, it's just quite a bit different from a lot of other languages
people might be familiar with, like, say, C or Python. OTOH, it's not any
_more_ different than Lisp.

I always heard good things about Smalltalk, but there was never anything so
compelling that it swayed me into investing the time to learn it. But I'm open
to being convinced, even now.

~~~
csdcasder
Take a look at Pharo. I did and Pharo is now my primary personal development
tool. Another thing that convinced me were videos by Laurent Laffont. Laffont
uses Pharo, IMHO, the way it is supposed to be used - he uses the debugger
intensively during development to prompt him to for the next step. His
development workflow is guided by a general outline in his mind, and the
details are filled in by the debugger prompts. His videos can be found at
Pharocasts.

~~~
mindcrime
OK, I'll check it out. Thanks for the heads-up.

