bash vs Pharo

Bash is the default shell on virtually every UNIX system. Making it very portable across different systems and once you get used to it, you can use it everywhere.

Since this is very mature shell there is a lot of great examples and other resources describing how to do almost everything.

Want to run something 5 times? Write a throw-away loop: for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do date; done
If you need it 100 times? Not a problem: for i in {1..100}; do date; done or: for ((i=0; i<100; ++i)); do date; done
How about emailing yourself when remote server is back online? Sure thing: while ! ping -c1 example.com &>/dev/null; do date; sleep 5; done && mailx -s 'server is back!' me@myself.com

BASH scripting is a rich and robust language.

alias and set will list aliases and variables in a format that can be run directly with no modifications. Even if the values contain \n.

This is handy if you want to modify a value.

ls **/*.log for example is supported by Bash if you set shopt -s globstar.

By default, BASH uses shortcuts and concepts very similar to Emacs, so learning one often results in familiarity with the other.

By default, there are many built-in features. They make really complex and reliable programs possible. In comparison to dash, for example, you can do the same tasks in less time and fewer lines of code.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement.

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.

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).

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.