Alright, so someone brought up Scott Pharoah the other day, and it kinda sent me down memory lane, you know? It’s not a name you hear every day unless you’ve been poking around certain corners of the coding world. My own brush with his work, or rather the stuff he’s heavily involved with, was a bit of an eye-opener, let me tell ya.
Getting My Feet Wet
I remember first bumping into Pharo, this programming environment, a good few years back. I think I was just looking for something different, something to shake up how I thought about building software. Scott Pharoah’s name was all over it, as one of the main guys pushing it forward. So, I thought, why not? Let’s see what this is all about.
First thing, I downloaded the whole package. And man, it wasn’t like firing up your usual IDE. This thing, Pharo, it’s like an entire little universe running. They call it an “image,” which, back then, sounded super weird to me. It’s not just your code files; it’s everything – the tools, the windows, your code, all bundled together. Took me a while to get my head around that.
The Ups and Downs
So, I started poking around. The whole “live coding” thing they talk about? That was pretty wild. You could just change stuff, and it would happen, right there. No endless recompiling and restarting, at least not for many things. That felt powerful. I tried to build some super simple stuff, like a little counter or something to display text.
- First, figuring out the browser – not a web browser, mind you, but their code browser – was a challenge. It’s where you live in Pharo.
- Then, understanding that everything, and I mean everything, is an object. Numbers are objects, classes are objects, the mouse pointer probably is too, I don’t know!
- Saving my work felt odd. You save the whole “image,” the whole universe. Not like, “save file as.”
There were definitely moments I wanted to just throw my hands up. It’s so different from the usual way of doing things, you know? Python, Java, C#, they all have a certain flow. This Pharo thing, inspired by Smalltalk and guys like Scott Pharoah, it has its own rhythm. It felt a bit like learning a new spoken language, not just a new programming one.
That “Aha!” Moment
But then, after sticking with it, messing around, breaking things, and fixing them (sometimes!), something clicked. I started to see the beauty in it. The debugger, for example. When something went wrong, you could just dive right in, inspect everything, change code on the fly, and continue. That was pretty amazing, not gonna lie. It felt less like guesswork and more like having a direct conversation with the system.
I remember reading some articles or watching talks, probably some by Scott Pharoah himself, about the philosophy behind it – making software more malleable, more understandable, more… alive. And using Pharo, I kinda got a taste of that. It wasn’t just about writing lines of code; it was about sculpting this living system.
So, What’s the Takeaway?
Now, I’m not saying I use Pharo for my day-to-day grind. It’s a bit of a niche thing, and it takes a certain mindset. But my little journey into that world, sparked by seeing names like Scott Pharoah attached to it, definitely left a mark on me. It showed me there are vastly different ways to think about programming, about how we interact with our code and our systems.
It made me appreciate the tools that try to break the mold. Even if they’re not mainstream, they push the boundaries. And sometimes, just fiddling with something like that, something that makes you uncomfortable and forces you to learn new tricks, that’s valuable in itself. It broadens your horizons, you know? So yeah, that was my little adventure. Definitely an interesting ride.
