That was my frustration. I made a game in SmallTalk at one point but there was no way to distribute it to people without giving them my whole image. I just wanted a simple .exe to hand out.
PS: You should be a bit more flexible. If you insist on programming, say, in Haskell the same way you program in C, all you'll do is hurt yourself. Same goes when you try to use an image-based environment like a standard IDE or toolchain.
Just look at how Pharo itself is distributed: it's a zip file you can uncompress and run right on your desktop. On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer.
You say this as if it's a good thing, it's not. It's a bad thing on Windows. It means the software will not be able to use a lot of facilities on the Windows platform. It's also a hassle for users who need to pick up a target directory, remember it's there, create a shortcut manually, etc...
There are reasons why modern operating systems use installers
As for the article, it is incredibly dated and wrong on many fronts about how people ship software on Windows.
I'll just address one point:
> Unfortunately is not a very flexible way to package anything into a single compiled executable. It is hard to ship an update - since you have to redeploy the executable anytime your program changes.
Installing and updating executables on Windows is a solved problem. Solved. It's so easy to deploy patches and even have software self update that nobody thinks about it any more. The fact that Pharo is reinventing its own process under the cover of doing it better (which they don't, it's worse by all standards) is precisely the problem that I was referring to: Pharo (and Smalltalk people in general) still don't understand how to deploy software on modern computers.
Just like unix!