[john1203]

>Pharo is specifically designed for commercial and industrial applications and not as a research environment. Partnering with private capital has been one source of funding for the project.

Does Pharo have a user base comparable to other programming environments?

If Pharo were really used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, it would be as popular as Python, Java or C++. And it is far from it.

I repeat, "Pharo is very, very fast, you can build a GUI application..." is not something that is sells today, and if it were so competitively, companies would use Pharo instead of Flutter, Swift, etc. and on a large scale.

[cess11]

To me that reads like gibberish. Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java?

Pharo and other Smalltalks are used in ERP and similar systems. It's attractive if your business requirements change a lot and you either don't want or can't afford to employ a legion of Java developers. You could write to https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/ and ask why those logos are at the bottom of that page, now that Smalltalk isn't as popular as it would be if it was any good.

As a CTO I don't really care whether a programming language and toolchain "sells today" or whether it is "competitive" in some general, presumably universal, sense. I want tooling that fits the problem domain really well, and sometimes niche tools outperform general tools by a large margin for certain problems. They might require fewer developers, allow faster development or better scaling than e.g. Java.

[igouy]

> To me that reads like gibberish.

Perhaps you could be more charitable in your reading.

> Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java?

Because those large-scale commercial and industrial Smalltalk applications are mid-1990s business-critical legacy systems!

"Over six months in 1996, Smalltalk’s place in the market changed from the enterprise darling COBOL replacement to yet another disappointing tool with a long tail of deployed applications that needed to be maintained. … the commercial Smalltalk vendors were unable to counter the Java hype cycle and development of new Smalltalk-based enterprise applications stopped. "

https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914