Summary of Pharo: Objects at your Fingertips

00:00:00 - 00:45:00

Pharo is an object-oriented programming language that is reflective and easy to use. It has a thriving community of users who help improve the language and develop new features. In this video, the Pharo language is introduced and demonstrated.

• 00:00:00 Pharo is a programming language and development environment that is reflective and object-oriented. It started with the code base of the original Smalltalk, and has since branched out to other languages and platforms. Pharo has a thriving community of users who help improve the language and develop new features.
• 00:05:00 Pharo is an extremely powerful object-oriented language that is similar in many ways to other languages people are familiar with, such as Java and Python. However, Pharo's simplicity makes it well-suited for more advanced tasks, such as developing reflective systems.
• 00:10:00 In this video, the Pharo language is introduced and demonstrated. Objects are created by sending messages to existing classes, and traits are groups of methods that can be put into classes or classes are composed from traits. Objects in the system understand a very long method with many parameters. Control structures are implemented using message sendings.
• 00:15:00 The video discusses Pharo, a programming language which is extremely versatile and easy to learn. Its syntax is simple, and it can be used without an environment. However, due to its simplicity, it is useless without Emacs.
• 00:20:00 The Pharo toolset is closely linked to the language, making it powerful but dangerous. There was no clear separation between the language in the environment and the language used in the tools, which can lead to problems when people build complicated projects. The class browser, for example, manipulates classes, and the inspector allows you to look inside objects.
• 00:25:00 Pharo implements objects in its code, allowing for quick exploration of the system.
• 00:30:00 The video discusses Pharo, an object-oriented programming language that allows programmers to write code that is executed on the computer rather than in memory. The video also mentions two books about Pharo: one for beginners and one for more experienced users. The video states that Pharo is used in industry, and specifically mentions two examples: a back-end for a logistics system and a mobile application.
• 00:35:00 The company, Pharo, has contributed all of the HTTP library for the current version of Fargo to follow. This collaboration between open-source research and industry is something that is interesting, and Pharo is trying to foster it. Pharo has also set up a consortium for Faro, which is meant for companies like that. There is the concept of a research membership and for example, user groups. The idea is that they have a way of communicating directly to the core team and to provide resources of doing things. Pharo has around twelve members, most of which are small companies. One is at a nine, and has contributed to libraries. Pharo has even some bigger members, like VMware. Pharo is working on a project to improve reflection, by asking the question, "What would it be like if everything was an object?" One project is to improve the reflective API, by structuring it better. Another project is to move the source code into objects, instead of text. There is already an AST behind every tool in Fargo, and the refactoring tools are using it. Finally, Pharo is working on a project to profile a computation, by asking the question, "What are the different ways to change the behavior of a computation?"
• 00:40:00 Pharo is a language that allows you to create and work on objects at your fingertips, much like how a virtual machine works. This allows for more efficient and isolated development environments, which could be useful for big data or other big projects.
• 00:45:00 The video discusses the Pharo object serialization framework, which is powerful but not always good for long-term deployment. Headless development is now very easy using the language and the integrated environment.