pharo VS Sandstorm

Smalltalk (https://pharo.org/)

Smalltalk also did this. These days my impression is the most active tendril is https://pharo.org/.

What I find especially interesting about that relative to this Python distro is that the Pharo executable runs in a host OS (e.g. whatever your daily driver is) and can maintain different image files for different Pharo system states. So not only do you have the integrated language/OS (which is very cool on its own), but you also have something that feels like Docker containers.

And it even goes beyond containers because those image files really are the state of the system at the time they're saved, which means you can ask for that file in a bug report and get guaranteed bug reproduction, which is pretty incredible.

It is the initial alpha release end-user can test. It is a complete port from Pharo to Cuis-Smalltalk. Likely bugs will be find.

I've recently started learning Pharo^1 and I think there is a lot to like about it. It hurts to say as a Lisp and Emacs fan, but using the Pharo IDE feels like using Emacs/extending Emacs with Emacs Lisp, but somehow with a more tightly integrated language and environment. Being able to easily inspect the code related to the UI widgets, modify it and make changes on the fly are unlike anything I've experienced in other languages. I think a whole OS built on top of Smalltalk would be so cool and really play into the strengths of Smalltalk. I'm also amazed that SmallTalk had a lot of these IDE like features since before the 80s^2. I know there are a lot of issues with image based languages, and I admit I haven't been using one long enough to have experienced all the Gotcha, so what does HN think of Smalltalks and it's derivatives, and what are you all doing with them?

1. https://pharo.org/

2. https://youtu.be/uknEhXyZgsg?t=2366

Cool! I program for around 7 months in Pharo now at Yesplan [0]. We're hiring a devops engineer and a software engineer. While the Pharo website [1] avoids mentioning it, it's a Smalltalk descendant.

What I like about Pharo:

1. Programming in the debugger makes things feel much quicker

2. Evaluating expressions inside your code editor makes programming feel much quicker

3. The ability to quickly browse classes and methods makes programming feel much quicker (e.g. I type Date somewhere, select it, press CMD+B and now I browse the Date class).

Don't get me wrong, Pharo has downsides, especially when it comes to using it in production (IMO). With that said, the language feels fun to use! I definitely like it now as my first language for side projects as it is more graphical, more playful, and feels quicker for iterative development (e.g. when consuming APIs). It's why I wanted to learn it in the first place, it has shown me a different philosophy on how programmers interact with a programming language and IDE.

[0] https://yesplan.be/en/vacancies

[1] https://pharo.org

Of course, Alan Kay's Smalltalk 80 is for many the quintessential lost paradise of personal computing. Some modern descendants are Squeak, Pharo and Cuis. Then there's Lisp machines, or for something more Unix-like, there's Plan 9.. so many cool systems deprived of mass adoption for no good reason.

> You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine). The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of the same trippy feeling is, of course, Emacs.

Do you know Pharo? The experience you describe is also typical in the Smalltalk family. See https://pharo.org/

Smalltalk could be used as the "ideal" tool (balance between Code & No-Code). It starts out with a simple graphical interface for doing everything, but it also encourages you to customize everything by modifying the underlying code. Of course, the disadvantage is that it's quite niche - very few people actually use it nowadays.

In Smalltalk there is no such thing as source files. Your program is an image which can be freely modified and dumped. Look at Pharo[1] which is a modern Smalltalk environment. You start it up and create classes in the IDE, but never do you create "source files".

[1] https://pharo.org/

Sandstorm really had this kind of feeling. Not that it presented as a desktop environment visually - but it offered a much more integrated “computer” of documents versus silod web site apps where you need to open each site to see the files in the app. https://sandstorm.io/

RemoteStorage https://remotestorage.io/ seems to be trying to do this too

I also really like the https://sandstorm.io approach which goes a little farther beyond

They tried, it was called sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/

I did read from somewhere, that with Wordpress SEO plugins etc some website got to top of search results.

Those that did website with other tech did not get same results, and thinked how to compete or survive.

For security, I use Sandstorm https://sandstorm.io fork of WordPress that generates static websites. But that does not work with some interactive plugins.

Urbit made the choice to use a bunch of silly new words for familiar concepts, not because they were inventing something so new that there were no words to describe it, but because they wanted to fool people into thinking that's what they were doing. Actually they just spent 10 years trying to do https://sandstorm.io/, but made it 10 times harder than it needed to be by coming up with a wacky new set of programming languages with silly names for everything.

That's funny, and it is OK to make fun of it.

I don't work at Cloudflare but follow their work and occasionally work on performance sensitive projects.

If I had to guess, they looked at the landscape a bit like I do and regarded Cap'n Proto, flatbuffers, SBE, etc. as being in one category apart from other data formats like Avro, protobuf, and the like.

So once you're committed to record'ish shaped (rather than columnar like Parquet) data that has an upfront parse time of zero (nominally, there could be marshalling if you transmogrify the field values on read), the list gets pretty short.

https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto-flatbuffers-... goes into some of the trade-offs here.

Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/. That work (which Kenton has presumably done at Cloudflare since he's been employed there) eventually turned into Cloudflare workers.

Another consideration: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues/2#issuecomment-...