Squeak or Pharo for the beginning Smalltalker?

Question

I am a Rubyist that is just starting to dabble in Smalltalk and am trying to chose an implementation to experiment with. It seems like Squeak or Pharo would be a good choice, bu

Answer 1

There might be a clear favourite but you have to develop it for yourself.

Pharo and squeak have huge parts in common. But as pharo is a fork from squeak it also means they diverge from each other.

If you look from the angle of learning smalltalk then both are equal. If you look from the angle of supported technologies then the situation might be a bit different. Most developers are either squeakers or pharoers. And developers create libraries and technology supporting frameworks. If the developer of a library is a pharoer I would expect the library to be better maintained in pharo than in squeak (and vice versa).

You should probably have a look at both and try the stuff you want to achieve. In most of the cases the experience will be the same. As soon as it stops being the same you might know your favourite already.

Answer 2

There is also VisualAge (VAST) by Instantiations and a recent edition is Smalltalk/X both of which share a similar interface, which in turn is vastly different from Pharo or Squeak. I use Pharo for my research, pet-projects and some proof of concepts stuff. My corporate software package is done in VAST/VASmalltalk/VisualAge which ever name you prefer. Also, remember, GNUSmalltalk.

Answer 3

The most traction right now is enjoyed by Pharo, so I'd go there. The runner-up is Visual Works. Just beware, no Smalltalk dialect is having a lot of traction right now.

My reasoning goes as follows. Today, Smalltalk is used for 2 things: Web programming and research. For both, Pharo has the upper hand (Seaside uses Pharo as its default platform, and University of Lille cranks out the most Smalltalk papers–––all built on Pharo).

The third thing Smalltalk is used for, although decreasingly so, is developing banking software. There, VW is still popular. Also, VW has the nicest object inspector.

Answer 4

To certain extent, it is a matter of personal taste. Pharo is fork of Squeak intended make it more modern version of Smalltalk, sometimes at expense of not sticking to backward compatibility to Squeak.

Pharo being a fork, also means that they share much in common, from VM to huge parts of class library. Many add on packages work with both of them, and some are developed with Squeak as primary dev platform and I guess a slightly larger number of them are developed in Pharo (Seaside, Pier, etc). Both variants have free intro books: Squeak by Example, and Pharo by Example, but Pharo one seems more up to date.

Personally I prefer Pharo since it gives me cleaner and more modern feeling.

Answer 5

Although not strictly a Smalltalk implementation one should not overlook Newspeak. Not as yet a production environment, but if you have been torn between Alan Kay and Nicolas Wirth as language experts Newspeak is like Smalltalk and Modula2 combined.

Answer 6

I'm doing a series of tutorials on how to use Squeak from very the start so naturally I am biased in favor of Squeak. Of course, I'm not afraid to use a different fork to show off specific packages most easily. For example, I use the one-click Pier image to introduce Seaside and Pier and that is basically Pharo.