Running the Pharo by Example Image
April 19, 2012 · Pharo, Smalltalk
This week brought Version 1.4 announcements for both Clojure and Pharo. The alignment of their version numbers was a coincidence, but I took it as a subtle hint from the computer language universe that I should renew my dabbling in Smalltalk.
The first time that I took Pharo for a spin, I got through the Professor Stef tutorial and was intrigued. I was beginning to see why people find Smalltalk to be so appealing. There is a real beauty in the simplicity and consistency of its object model. I got busy and sidetracked, though, and didn’t make it much further than that.
This time around, I am planning to work my way through Pharo By Example. Unfortunately, the image used by the examples in the book does not run on the VM that comes with Pharo 1.4: it crashes on startup. This post on the Pharo Users mailing list pointed me in the right direction. It turns out that the image does not run on the Squeak/Cog-based VM distributed with Pharo 1.4.
I don’t know about other platforms, but for OS X, the answer is to use the non-Cog Squeak 5.7.x Cocoa VM available at squeakvm.org. Download it, unzip it, and drag the Pharo by Example image onto it. That will launch the image and then you can start working through the book.
Happy Smalltalking!
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