Pharo is Smalltalk
Pharo is the best representative of Smalltalk today. It is Open Source and free for all to use. It has the most active community (the massive European Smalltalk User Group, or ESUG, is mostly Pharo users). The last release of Pharo had nearly four dozen contributors! The Pharo Project is working unwaveringly to advance the language (with things like the traits model and slots model) and its associated tools. The Pharo IDE has all the good stuff that we value, such as colour syntax highlighting, code completion, code browsing, object inspection, etc. Its powerful new debugger is second to none in the world!
Pharo is backed by an impressive list of companies and organizations; for example, the Pharo Consortium has:
- INRIA, a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics
- FAST, an Argentinian foundation advancing Smalltalk usage across the country
- GemTalk Systems, a major products and services company serving various industries around the world such as finance, insurance, transportation, telecommunications, and utilities
- ESUG
- Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague
Just to name a few.
Pharo is used by an even more impressive list of organizations, for example:
Universities
- University of Bern, Switzerland
- Université de Montpellier, France
- Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium
- University of Brescia, Italy
Companies
And many other companies.
Remember that the Pharo Project is only seven years old with the first release of Pharo in 2010. This is remarkable penetration in so short a time. Check out these Pharo success stories; they are most inspiring.
If there is any evidence that Smalltalk is alive and well today, it is to be found in Pharo. Smalltalk should not be judged by its popularity ranking at TIOBE and Redmonk, but rather by its usefulness in industry and academia. Pharo is enormously useful, indeed.
Concerning Pharo is a Medium publication dedicated to Pharo programming.
