Pharo - not quite Smalltalk, possibly worse than VisualWorks
Just a short one this time - it was nagging at me that I didn't try a more modern version of Smalltalk and Pharo comes up a lot in searches. Downloaded, installed, a quick test drive:
I was expecting it to be familiar but different and it definitely is. I thought I would start by porting over the AWS helper classes I made, which went fine (there is a JSON parser called "STONJSON" which is all caps for some reason, but works similar to the Xtream one in VisualWorks. I hit a fairly big snag though, there is no simple way to kick off an operating system process. There seems to have been some kind of fight in Pharo-land about OSProcess vs. OSSubProcess, neither of which is included in the standard image, neither of which can spawn a program on Windows(!), something which is both weird and a little frightening for a supposedly cross platform environment.
Hilariously, the "LibC resultOfCommand:" method starts a command shell on Windows (and only Windows) which overlays while it runs, then the stdout results come back as expected. OK, I could live with that I guess.
