ASP.NET MVC vs Pharo
When comparing ASP.NET MVC vs Pharo, the Slant community recommends Pharo for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Pharo is ranked 20th while ASP.NET MVC is ranked 61st. The most important reason people chose Pharo is:
In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Mature
The framework has many build-in tools, and many packages have been written targeting the framework.
Pro Cross platform
.Net Core can work on any platform.
Pro Widely used
It's pretty easy to find a job with it and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials around.
Pro Extensive documentation
There are a lot of resources available to get help.
Pro Fast
Asp.NET Core on Linux is fast accordingly to TechEmpower benchmarks.
Pro Asp.NET core provides balance between magic/agility and craftsmanship
You can get ordinary details quickly but with complete freedom to make your craft, knowing everything that is happening underneath the cloths. The highly modular system makes it possible to scale small applications to large ones with ease.
Pro It has more users than any other backend web framework
Getting your next contract is easy with this on your CV.
Pro Object-Oriented
In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well.
Pro Easily learnt
There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired.
Pro Live updates
The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time.
Pro Highly productive
Pro Seaside
The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably.
Pro Remote debugging
Pro Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE
No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too).
Pro Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector
Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code.
Pro Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment
Pro 64 bit support as of Pharo 7
Use 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Pharo on Windows, Mac & Linux.
Pro Advanced code analysis tools
MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement.
Pro Can run headless for production
Pro Really simple networking and REST with Zinc
Pro Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal
Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work.
Cons
Con Core and full ASP.NET are bit confusing sometimes
While not in feature parity (yet) they are still apart and support sometimes funky combinations of features - full ASP.NET has all the bells and whistles but doesn't offer cross platform so you may have to do some research what you really need. That being said, it got a lot better in 2.0.
Con Expensive
You need to have the plate to maintain a site.
Con Small community
But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous.
Con Odd language
Requires a different mindset. Much harder to apply what you know from popular or conventional languages . Switching over from or between other languages is more difficult.
Con Single threaded
Pharo's VM only ever uses one CPU core. If you want to write code that uses more than one CPU core, you need to jump through hoops such as running multiple VMs and synchronising your data.