Just a heads up the pharolauncher does not seem to be working for me, at least for pharo 9. Manual download of vm + image 64bit works but 32 bit does not.
I have been making pharo raylib bindings and plan to make a video soon about why Smalltalk is an interesting choice for game development, it's a very 'live-coding' feel, i.e. you run your game while the editor is still live, you have free reign to at any time modify the methods of all game objects, execute random code, etc. without restarting the game...
Yeah, the more usual wording is "given a free rein", which makes it a little clearer. A monarch isn't given their reign, it's theirs by right (well, with a bit of hand-waving. Or possibly sword-waving, but not since Henry VII).
James II entertained the same delusions as Charles of being absolute monarch. He had a kinder fate, being carefully allowed to escape twice on his journey to France.
Giving 'free rein' comes from the pragmatic practice of allowing a horse to chose the best path over difficult terrain on the grounds that the animal would know better than the rider.
A few years ago i was actually considering making a Smalltalk "dialect" (which i called Gametalk :-P) just for gamedev - some modern engines remind me a lot of Smalltalk in how they work, but they obviously stop at the resource editing level. So i thought that making the entire thing "live" and in itself would be the next obvious step.
(the reason i decided for a dialect is that modern Smalltalks carry a TON of baggage they collected over the decades - sure the language is tiny but they carry more objects than a transatlantic freighter :-P - and i wanted something lean with only the stuff i needed)
I never went beyond the prototyping phase but probably will pick the project up again if i end up getting annoyed by my current language and framework choices :-P.
Yeah i've seen Cuis at the past, it is certainly a leaner Smalltalk compared to Pharo (though TBH i am not a fan of Squeak's UI). If nothing else it can serve as inspiration.
Also now that i think about it, Cuis might be a good Smalltalk environment for starting out or learning about the language in general since i always get the feeling that the more feature packed dialects like Pharo are a bit intimidating.
Juan has done some really impressive work on Morphic3, which uses a vector graphics engine of his own design. He's also pared down Cuis' version of Morphic to its most basic elements, so one could change the appearance of the UI to whatever, theoretically
there was a problem with the PhL, that took more time to update of what we thought. Now it should be working... but please take into account that 32bit versions are deprecated (unless you're working on ARM)
It turns out to be the capital 'X' in X86 that is the problem. The same URL but with a lowercase 'x' works fine. Presumably someone in the Pharo team need to fix whatever image metadata the Pharo launcher is working from.
Are you on macOS? I installed Pharo 9 yesterday and had to use the command line install method. The Pharo Launcher puts images and other files in ~/Documents which I find problematic. I created a folder ~/Pharo, cc’d to it, and ran the curl command line installation option.
I wish that there were a Common Lisp with a Pharo like UI, like my old Lisp Machine.
I have been making pharo raylib bindings and plan to make a video soon about why Smalltalk is an interesting choice for game development, it's a very 'live-coding' feel, i.e. you run your game while the editor is still live, you have free reign to at any time modify the methods of all game objects, execute random code, etc. without restarting the game...