Why Pharo Might be the Future of Software Development (2017)
Anything by Richard Kenneth Eng isn&#x27;t worth the read. Props to the guy for promoting what he loves, but he never gives any good reasons or data to back up the non-existent reasons.<p>His personal points of view are all you get, heavily disguised as assertions about Smalltalk and the environment being categorically better or easier than things with which nobody seems to be exhibiting any real problems. Because the assertions aren&#x27;t backed up with evidence, it&#x27;s hard to take seriously. Not to mention every single post on every single website just repeats the same things ad infinitum; it&#x27;s basically spam at this point.<p>This is mirrored by some of the more rabid fans. Whenever Smalltalk is brought up on HN, there&#x27;s invariably someone or other to come and espouse that live coding is better than compile-debug-rinse-repeat. Why? Because it is. In what way is it better? It just is.<p>I mean, why wouldn&#x27;t I want to switch to developing apps in an unfamiliar way with little in the way of easy-to-understand documentation, contained within an alien user interface to my beloved macOS, limited to an unnecessarily difficult-to-use IDE, using a language that I can only use in the IDE, that can&#x27;t integrate with damn near any other popular or modern tools and workflows, whose ability to target mobile (or hell, native platform-specific experiences) is either in its infancy (in 2018!) or completely non-existent, and whose proponents can&#x27;t give a clear answer to what the big deal is?<p>Yeah, no. A million posts saying the same things won&#x27;t make a damned bit of difference.