Is there a snippet of example code to look at? I browsed the pharo.org website, but couldn't find an example to give me a taste. I even tried googling "pharo example" and with a brief look at the results didn't find an example.

Today, there are hundreds of programming languages competing for attention. It is in your interest to put an example front and center of why one should spend time looking into yet another programming language.

This may not be immediately apparent, but I discovered that Smalltalk did not fit into the 'programming language' concepts in my head. I think of a typical bytecode VM language as

  [source code] -> [interpreter] -> [running program]

Instead Smalltalk is more like

  [running program] + [auto persistence] + [editing tools]

So you don't modify large gobs of source code files, you modify the running program from within - aka live editing. The running program consists of a network of interconnected objects. You use the textual syntax also - but only to modify parts of the already live program (e.g. you could 'install' a new method on an existing class object). You inspect the running program using graphical browsers (typically also part of the same program) - and everything you modify is live immediately.

The syntax of Smalltlak is interesting (can be seen here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Syntax). But the more interesting aspects of the experience are the live editing, working with network of objects, hybrid text/non-text ways of modifying these objects, etc.

spc476

So, how do you distribute the program you've just written? That's the issue I have with image based languages.

vanderZwan

Well, Pharo seems to have quite a few contributors, so they probably figured something out. Let me have a look..

So, based on these slides about Pharo 6[0], it seems that they use multiple things. First, they have a tool called Epicea, which is a more modern way of tracking changes to an image[1]. Then, for git integration, they have a bunch of tools at pharo-vcs, specifically Iceberg[2].

[0] https://www.slideshare.net/pharoproject/pharo-6

[1] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~MartinDias/Epicea

[2] https://github.com/pharo-vcs, https://github.com/pharo-vcs/iceberg