There is, if you consider it is a Smalltalk dialect.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/

https://gemtalksystems.com/

So you can learn Smalltalk with Pharo and then get into the big boys Smalltalk.

However expect the typical enterprise projects where Oracle DB licenses are footnotes on the overall budget.

These are commercial vendors, but there are industrial uses of Pharo itself, and as Pharo gets better a lot of companies are moving from their commercial dialects to Pharo. In particular from Cincom Smalltalk to Pharo.

Thanks for the heads up.

I deployed a few web apps running on gemstone based on their community edition starter license. You can get a lot going just based on that and it really isn't as expensive as Oracle.

The Oracle example was more a kind of figure of speech regarding the kind of clients that are willing to pay for commercial Smalltalk, based on the listed customers use cases.

How was your experience?

Well, I never got to needing a paid license so it never was a worry. I found the database size tended to grow more slowly than what I expected from past experience with MariaDB/MySql and PostgreSQL.

All and all I found the killer really was the ability to store situations where an exception was raised and being able to replay it later. It saved a ton of time for debugging.

Thanks for the overview.

There is steadily growing industry backing for Pharo formalised in the Pharo Consortium - companies putting hard cash on the line to support its open source development. http://consortium.pharo.org/web

I seem to recall Pharo was used in logistics somewhere. Plus, here are some more stories: https://pharo.org/success