Somebody has never used ENVY[0].

[0]: https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/

I know at least 5 Pharo users, and one of them wrote a book about it (for the other 4 :P). They were part of a research group at university and made us students use it. I get why it's nice and all, but honestly it feels a bit like Crossfit, or Vim. There are a small handful of excited users who try to convice everyone else how amazing it is. (Sorry, Oscar et al.)

It's getting harder to pick between Pharo vs Eiffel for a new project :)

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tbh im not sure what the value of this comment is here; also not a fan of talking down on other people's work (irrespective of how much you might dislike them). the most charitable explanation is that this was sarcasm?

I am sorry to hear that, I hope you will rediscover the joys of programming one day again!

Humans haven't given up playing chess just because computers are able to do it better, there is still a point in recreational programming.

I am fondly remembering actually using Smalltalk in production for a small web project. I think I used Squeak with the Seaside framework. The image based workflow made deploying it surprisingly easy.

>One thing that AI programming has done is made me care much less what programming language is being used

I'm right there with you. I really like programming in Python, the language. Now that I'm not writing much if any code, the rough edges in building and deployment have come to the forefront. Even "uvx run" has become a sticky wicket (I have some machines that don't have Internet access).

SmallJS ( https://smal-js.org ) is a file based Smalltalk with full agent support. Here's a vid of Claude converting a Counter app into a tic-tac-toe game in a single shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ir6h2MIRg

I spent some time exploring Glamorous Toolkit [1] for agent-assisted custom UI development, in an emacs fashion, where you'd modify the interface you're working with on the fly. It was a pretty good experience and the built-in data exploration was top notch.

Ironically after watching glamorous toolkit videos on youtube, I was recommended a talk by Geoffrey Litt about dynamic documents [2] and at the end of his talk I learned about bb [3], which has much better agent integration compared to GT. Like @thelazydogsback said, with agents, the programming language matters less.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MccJdr61xnc

[3] https://getbb.app/

It got me interested so i ashed ChatGpt about the options andit found this repo: https://pharo-llm.github.io/pharo-mcp

Sounds pretty cool. Never heard about Pharo before, but i will try it in spare time.

>Intuitively it seems like a match made in heaven, since the agent can directly manipulate the running program

This should be a BIG benefit for agent-driven development, but sadly it seems that few people is taking advantage of it.

It works well, I mostly use Pi with MCP.

>"Reading stuff like this continue to make advances and new releases is like a fever dream when everything else is all AI."

Do the advances mean anything though? Alan Kay is a personal hero of mine, I love the aesthetic of Smalltalk, and the dream-that-was once upon a time of such a system was a real missed opportunity for the evolution of programming environments. But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

Interesting they seem to avoid mentioning Pharo is a smalltalk on the website, really only one passing mention on the about page.

If you love that idea but don't mind the switching out the language, CLOG [1] does this on Common Lisp.

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

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you mean like amber smalltalk?

https://www.amber-lang.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Smalltalk

or more like https://squeak.js.org/ ?

PharoJS?

https://pharojs.org/

You're right. They should add more soul, and make the next one look like it's from 2003!

I did the same thing! I thought it was strange as I always heard it referred to as “pharo smalltalk”, at first I was confused if this was the right project.