emaringolo
In Smalltalk the class is the sole instance of another class (MetaClass), so a "static method" becomes a "class-side" method. And so it is inheritable.
The meta relationship is hard to understand (at first), but it is part of what causes the parsimony in all the interactions, and the "everything is an object". https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57898036/is-it-true-that...
Primitives (as in int, double, etc.) are a different subject, and although an Integer or a Smallinteger is a specially optimized object, it has the overhead of being an object (as in "Boxed" Integer in other languages), instead of some bytes at some memory location.
Most of the times you don't need the optimized version, and if were the case that you do, then it's when you optimize that piece of execution specifically (maybe making an external call to a more low-level, optimized version).
But Pharo's is inspired by Smalltalk, and I myself consider it Smalltalk, but the purpose of the detachment is to not be constrained by having to continue being Smalltalk.
E.g. in Pharo instance variables are first class objects (called "Slots").
Dependency Management: Yes. Source code control: Yes (proprietary, file based/git) Continuous Integration: Jenkins, TravisCI, TeamCity Deployment: I'm aware of people using Docker and Ansible, and regular file copy/scp deployment.
I don't know what defines the verb "good", "flexible" and "well supported". I think they are. File based VCS is not out of the box, but is an available feature and many people are moving to that in order to use GitHub or similar services.
But if you like dynamic languages, and being highly productive with a "years ahead" development environment, then Pharo is a good alternative.
Many of the features you see added today to mainstream IDEs, have a background in Smalltalk. Even in Chrome Debugger the "code hot swap" is a showcase feature, whilst Smalltalk have it since decades.
And of course, Smalltalk provides features that no other environment/languages provides yet. So if you want to take advantage of those now, instead of waiting for them reaching mainstream, then it matters to use it now.
Features like those provided by Moose (http://moosetechnology.org/) will take years to be available as an Eclipse Plugin. :)
If you never heard of Smalltalk, you can google it. But as a summary I can tell you it is the father of Object-Oriented Programming, BitBlt, the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Unit Testing practice (SUnit), the Refactoring engine, among other things people take for granted today.
What's missing to have a "nice" (working?) configuration for Pharo 2.0?
Great work!