I’m trying to return to Smalltalk after a 15+ year break (VisualAge, ENfin/2 ST-80 etc), and have been trying to get back into the saddle with Pharo 8 and Pharo 9.
Since I have no legacy code - I’ve opted for Pharo 9 knowing a stable release isn’t far away. My goal is to produce several applications for private use, and regain some competence in Smalltalk along the way. The apps are business accounting/investing style apps - not too technical. I’m really not keen on the prospect of using any of the other ‘mainstream’ alternatives we have today. I’m confident I can build a domain model easily enough, but the Pharo environment is my stumbling point - especially building the GUI with Spec2. I’m really spinning my wheels trying to get a useful Spec2 application built. It needs to have menus, a toolbar, tabbed notebooks, tree lists etc - plus a dozen or so tabular panes (to view/maintain my domain model). Ideally it would also be able to use ODBC or UDBC or Excel etc for transaction storage. I’ve been through all the building blocks in SpDemo but there a just too many concepts to familiarise with and test bit by bit as I buildup a more realistic functioning application. It has been very frustraing and time consuming. I understand why there are not yet solid guides available (book, tutorial, examples) , so I thought the best way would be to use an existing Spec2 application to help me get it going. I think this would save me many weeks of effort. Could anyone point me to at a working non-trivial application that I could share and use a starting point. Any suggestions to help me get into the heart of my application would be most welcome…!
