this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Programming
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How does it compare to common lisp? IMO that's the gold standard for immediate feedback and interactive development.
You can try also https://gtoolkit.com/ The language is the same of Pharo, but the GUI is better, IMHO.
Glamorous Toolkit/Pharo are better than CL as IDE/GUI. It is more like a "video-game", because the IDE is a first class citizen and you can customize it. For example you can notice if some classes are not passing some tests, because there are flags in the IDE.
As language I prefer CL, because metaprogramming (i.e. macro) are more explicit and clear respect Smallatalk approach.
In CL you have something like "(some-dsl-prefix ...)" and all the things following the "(some-dsl-prefix ...)" are clearly is the specified DSL. You can expand the macro, for seeing its semantic.
In Smalltalk you had to check the metaclass that created the object, but objects can be created in different point respect their usage, so good luck. Then you had to inspect if the behavior of some standard method is modified/customized. CL macro run at compile-time, while Smalltalk metaprogramming code run at run-time, using reflection, and customization of metaclasses.
A CL macro has a better view of the DSL code, because it can walk in it. I don't remember how Smalltalk solves this.
I tried Smalltalk few years ago, so maybe I missed something.