Pharo
Ranked 2 of 3 smalltalk environments by recommenders
Free, open-source Smalltalk environment that people praise for live modification and tooling, with the most common caveat being a dated-looking interface and a flat package browser.
Free, open-source Smalltalk environment that people praise for live modification and tooling, with the most common caveat being a dated-looking interface and a flat package browser.
32 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 21
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 66%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 21 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Free and open source
“pharo nowadays which is free, opensource and under active development”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)” “There is Pharo (and Squeak) as a free SmallTalk.”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)” Good for experimenting with ideas
“Smalltalk environments such as Squeak and Pharo appear to be great environments to play around with such ideas”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design” “Smalltalk seems like the most promising platform for implementing it”
Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “Red Programming Language: Static linking support” Actively developed, improving releases
“order of magnitudes better than say, Pharo 9-- in every way”
Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Pharo 14” “pharo nowadays which is free, opensource and under active development”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)” “continue to make advances and new releases”
Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “Pharo 14” Runs well, good display support
“It could use some UI improvements, but it runs much better than other apps I've tried”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “When Code is Free, Why is Claude is an Electron app?” “moved to Pharo to get better high resolution display support”
Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Looks dated, needs UI work
“Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo was supposed to be the future, but it feels like an IDE stuck in the 90's.”
Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes” “It could use some UI improvements, but it runs much better than other apps I've tried”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “When Code is Free, Why is Claude is an Electron app?” “They should add more soul, and make the next one look like it's from 2003!”
Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “Pharo 14” - Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “Pharo 14”
Seems impractical for everyday work
“I could never make myself like Pharo (or Smalltalk). Yes, it's interesting and exotic, but it never seemed really practical.”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “We Lost Something: 1970s REPLs Were Better Than Modern Development Environments” “for many things pharo/squeak are really shitty runtimes”
Comment from 31 Dec 2025 in “Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself [pdf]”
Other smalltalk environments people recommend
The two most recommended other smalltalk environments, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squeak Smalltalk | 25 | 6 | 81% | 10 | 10 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| PharoThis page | 21 | 11 | 66% | 9 | — | — |
| Cuis Smalltalk | 11 | 0 | 100% | 5 | — | Approved |
What people said
37 of the 40 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Pharo does have some cool stuff though”
“I've tried Pharo 14 and it's order of magnitudes better than say, Pharo 9-- in every way.”
“order of magnitudes better than say, Pharo 9-- in every way”
“it's easy enough to follow along”
“In tradtional live Smalltalks like Pharo, modifying stuff is easy, but running full tests not so much..”
“honestly it feels a bit like Crossfit, or Vim”
“They should add more soul, and make the next one look like it's from 2003!”
“Why does it look like something from 2012 tho”
“the sole user of Pharo in the world”
“continue to make advances and new releases”
“a tool for just this use case”
“handles this across various providers and lets you examine usage in exacting detail”
“There is Pharo (and Squeak) as a free SmallTalk.”
“pharo nowadays which is free, opensource and under active development”
“moved to Pharo to get better high resolution display support”
“Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo was supposed to be the future, but it feels like an IDE stuck in the 90's.”
“until then no high-DPI support”
“GToolkit (built on Pharo Smalltalk) integrates tightly with Git for VCS”
“you get a glimpse of it in Emacs, Pharo or Oberon”
“Pharo is especially bad at it”
“Smalltalk seems like the most promising platform for implementing it”
“A step down from there, but still respectable, is Pharo and the browser/Electron.”
“amazingly similar to Pharo Smalltalk which I still occasionally use”
“The left-most 'package' pane is a flat list.”
“I am just as likely to get the kids on Pharo or Squeak”
“as much as I love Smalltalk, I see this post as an illustration of all that's wrong in that community”
“This is so damn cool. And most people won’t even see why.”
“It could use some UI improvements, but it runs much better than other apps I've tried”
“both Glamorous Toolkit and plain Pharo have tooling that allows integration of both local and remote LLM services”
“This is a delightful little website.”
“which I wrestled with as an undergrad minutes before my labs”
“Smalltalk environments such as Squeak and Pharo appear to be great environments to play around with such ideas”
“for many things pharo/squeak are really shitty runtimes”
“it seems to tick all those boxes”
“IMO this is partially true but that's mostly because not enough people are working on it.”
“I could never make myself like Pharo (or Smalltalk). Yes, it's interesting and exotic, but it never seemed really practical.”
“The cool thing with Pharo and Lisp of course is the whole "treating code as data"”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.