Absolutely right. Pharo came out in 2008 — it’s a relatively new programming language, hardly outdated.
Pharo is the fastest-innovating Smalltalk in history. It has achieved an incredible amount in just one decade:
- Pharo has greatly improved the IDE.
- Pharo has overhauled the VM.
- Pharo has become the preeminent Smalltalk for web development, thanks to Seaside, Teapot, and PharoJS.
- Pharo has made huge strides in the area of data science. Roassal is especially noteworthy for data visualization.
- Pharo led to the wonderful Glamorous Toolkit.
- Pharo has broken into the fields of robotics, IoT, and virtual reality.
- The Pharo Consortium was created to advance Pharo development.
Just to list a few.
Moreover, it is foolish to overlook the “heritage” aspect. Part of Smalltalk’s heritage is its built-in live coding capability. This powerful programming technique made Smalltalk the most productive general-purpose language in the world, by far. There is both anecdotal and statistical evidence to support this.
What is it worth to a business or corporation to cut their software development time in half? Productivity, or the lack thereof, is one of the most pressing issues in IT today.
Pharo is Smalltalk. It offers the same remarkable productivity advantage.
