Parasol Alternatives

Parasol reviews and mentions

• Pharo 11
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 May 2023

  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

• Pharo 10
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Apr 2022

  ```

  As you can see, I've hacked the _: to be a separator of some sorts, but what it actually is, is an argument of a message. You can do all kinds of fun stuff with this. See [8].

  8. When you overwrite #doesNotUnderstand then you can inspect the message and its arguments. So whether you send Object1 a:arg1 veryImportant:arg2 message:arg3, then you can inspect those arguments. In the case above, this means you can also inspect _:arg1 _:arg2 or _:arg1 _:arg2 _:arg3 ... _;argN. In other words, you can deal with variable arguments and it doesn't matter what they're called. Because of this, it's easy to create a simple DSL, if you need another separator, then simply add one. You have a lot of characters at your disposal that are quite unique [4]. I figured that out by using by using point (2) and just looking around in the environment.

  __Web Development__

  9. Seaside is capable of live and dynamic updating. MOOCs won't tell you this because it requires using Seaside quite differently. In short, the pattern that I see used at my work is by having server-side rendered HTML that has designated blocks as callbacks. So when you send your server-side rendered HTML, those callback blocks will transform itself into a jQuery GET/POST request. Pharo writes the jQuery for you. We also use React, but I haven't gotten around to it how it's used, I'm fairly sure we don't use anything like Redux.

  10. In terms of testing, it's relatively easy to write tests. As with Go, it's all included and you're ready to test! Also note: if you want to use Selenium tests, you can use Parasol [5], it's quite easy to use.

  11. The following concepts are not explained well, so I'll do it: Seaside heavily uses what we'd call middleware in NodeJS (filters in Seaside). In NodeJS/Express we also have a request object that exists during the lifetime of a request. In Seaside this is called a dynamic variable (WADynamicVariable is the class).

  __Stuff I wrote out in the open__

  12. I've been working on refactoring i18n in Seaside [6]. I currently find the approach Pharo uses the nicest approach, which is something along the lines of:

  'You have some string that needs translation in your web app' SeasideTranslated

  When you want to export a catalog file of all the strings you want to translate, then you send exportCatalog new exportCatalog and it will look through the whole image and find every tagged string and export it into a catalog (.pot) file that you can edit with POEdit (a free Mac app [7]).

  13. I wrote a simple animation that shows the definition of sin and cos [8]. Most of the code is shown in that video, IMO it gives a good enough sense how to use it.

  __Bottom Line Thoughts__

  14. I think Pharo is a production-ready language for SaaS apps where you can easily scale by adding instances. I am not sure if it'd be production-ready for consumer facing web apps with many concurrent users.

  15. It's an amazing language to create desktop applications for.

  16. The debugger capabilities are awesome and there's active research on it. Time travel debugging is currently in its PoC phase (source: Pharo Days).

  17. It's also a good language for live music making (source: Pharo Days where someone demo-ed some live coded acid music).

  [0] https://discord.gg/QewZMZa

  [1] We're hiring developers able to work in Europe and based in a European time zone. The way we use Pharo is IMO the real deal, it goes far beyond what any MOOC can teach you.

  https://yesplan.be/en/vacancy/full-stack-software-engineer

  [2] https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner

  [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUEnRrUZ-Ug

  [4] ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzªµºÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ

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

  [6] https://github.com/SeasideSt/Seaside/tree/gettext-fix

  [7] https://poedit.net/features

  [8] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z3UwTAj4A2CRo_TXk6JNG-mN9yM...