Roassal3 VS pharo

IMO it's a good tool for web scraping. The reason: you can do web scraping with Parasol (i.e. Selenium [1]) and then if you need visualization tools then you can immediately use Roassal [2]. The thing is: Pharo and the fact that it's more GUI-oriented than other programming languages, allows for data visualization a bit easier.

Another use-case is: open-source software where you want to encourage users to just open up "the damn code engine" and hack straight into it, seeing it change on the fly. Like, can you just right click in Windows on a pixel and change the code that underlies it? In Pharo you can! Commercial parties would find this horrible, but it's amazing for full open-source software.

For web apps, B2B works quite well. B2C, I see scalability issues.

[1] https://github.com/SeasideSt/Parasol

[2] https://github.com/ObjectProfile/Roassal3

I think in part it's because the idea that programming is text and math-based is too ingrained in society.

For example, we talk about programming languages. But IMO there are also programming systems such as Smalltalk [1]. I've programmed 2 years professionally in it, currently looking for an engagement in a different language (a curiosity thing, also a resume thing).

I think Smalltalk has a lot to offer by switching the programmer's view of thinking about programming systems rather than programming languages.

Moreover, programming systems is also not where it is at. One downside that Pharo in particular has is that the community is small. A lot of plugins/libraries that are a given in other languages aren't there! For some, however, this is a strength because one gets to learn much better how to build stuff from the ground up and tinker on it by yourself. Given that there is still a lot of low hanging fruit it is easy to become a contributor.

But this part, whether a community is big or small means that I think it's smarter to think about programming ecosystems where a programming language or programming system is the central hub connecting the programming community together.

Why don't schools teach about programming communities? See my first sentence ;-)

[1] https://pharo.org - a modern Smalltalk

I read Pharo for just a split second

And Pharo is a good Smalltalk!

What you need is a cross platform GUI framework that still is a mutable environment allowing easy extend ability with a simple language. May I suggest Pharo Smalltalk?

https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/9729#issuecomm...

When all the required dependencies are being found on your Fedor install we should wonder why "the VM seemed to hang and never started properly".

Consider playing with Pharo [1], it shows how it can still use Git to store sources in background.

There is LivelyKernel [2] but some versions are more file-oriented (like Lively 4 [3)

[1] https://pharo.org/