There is no single selling point. Here are some surface things that I immediately liked:
1. You can download a single zip file (Pharo Standalone) and it will give you all the tools of a modern IDE without shitting all over your system and with faster startup than Atom, VS Code or even LINQPad.
2. The environment retains all its state across restarts. The editor stuff, the running state of the program - everything.
3. You have the same capabilities as the people who developed the language. You program, the run-time environment and the editor itself can be browsed and edited by the same set of tools, without any extra hoops. There is very little "magic".
4. The syntax of the language is designed so that you can create DSLs without using macros or pre-processors.
5. It's the only environment in my recent memory where I can do stuff without opening the web browser to search for something every 5 minutes.
6. IMO, breaking the system into four-tier structure made the whole thing much more tractable than infinitely nested directories or namespace hierarchies. I also like that there is no need to manage files with code.
1. You can download a single zip file (Pharo Standalone) and it will give you all the tools of a modern IDE without shitting all over your system and with faster startup than Atom, VS Code or even LINQPad.
2. The environment retains all its state across restarts. The editor stuff, the running state of the program - everything.
3. You have the same capabilities as the people who developed the language. You program, the run-time environment and the editor itself can be browsed and edited by the same set of tools, without any extra hoops. There is very little "magic".
4. The syntax of the language is designed so that you can create DSLs without using macros or pre-processors.
5. It's the only environment in my recent memory where I can do stuff without opening the web browser to search for something every 5 minutes.
6. IMO, breaking the system into four-tier structure made the whole thing much more tractable than infinitely nested directories or namespace hierarchies. I also like that there is no need to manage files with code.