Comment by melvinroest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by melvinroest | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with you. I've worked for a while at a company using it in production [1].

For learning Pharo (while not working at a company), I've learned that going to ESUG [1] and Pharo Days [2] (2 conferences) is the best way to actually learn. On ESUG there are many professional Smalltalkers, including people that write Pharo. And on Pharo Days there are many OG Pharo devs. They can teach you certain things much quicker than any course can.

For example, on ESUG, I was shown how to write a debugger extension on the spot for a particular debugging case (with animations) that had no good working debugging support yet. It was amazing to see how quick people can develop it when they have strong knowledge on it. The fact that the language is inspectable helps a ton.

Another way to learn is by asking many questions on their Discord channel [4]. The community seems really active there and I found them to be really friendly. The Pharo website [5] sort of understates how active their spun off communities are as they simply mention that they exist, but the site doesn't really convey the vibe of how lively the communities are. I'm not sure how one would go about that, but it's a shame you can't directly see that from a website.

[1] https://yesplan.be

[2] https://esug.org

[3] https://days.pharo.org

[4] https://discord.gg/QewZMZa

[5] https://pharo.org/community

I think Pharo would benefit a lot from having lots and lots of screen casts, since so much stuff is visual. I don't think something like ESUG is a sustainable way to spread techniques. A lot of stuff that is well documented in the Pharo ecosystem is old. A lot of the new stuff doesn't have great docs. Just reference docs and code is not enough. There has to be a coherent narrative around an API to put it together.

Also, I'm all onboard having a UI environment for programming, but it needs to have great keybindings that follow platform HIGs, and at least my Pharo 10 experience of the window management was really bad.

I wrote about this some https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/experiencing-smalltalk/

i agree. here is a screencast i made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38995507

i don't know how much has changed since then. but if pharo has changed so much that this screencast can no longer be used then that's a problem in itself. we are not going to gwt more screencasts if their halflife is to short.

Looking over the syntax, it seems that lines end with a period, much like in English. This makes much more sense than semicolon!

That said, it looks like you end up with a million windows to do anything. Seems like the UI could be better UX'd, no? Guessing this a community that would treat such a comment as harassment.

why would it be considered harassment? it's not like your comment is any more critical than many of the others here.

as for the million windows, if you go that from my videos, then i'd like to point out that the interface has indeed improved since. for one it added the ability to group windows with tabs: https://youtu.be/GGJZeajjWGU?list=PLqbtQ7OkSta0ULYAd7Qdxof85...

(interestingly, that video is older than mine, so it seems that i just hadn't discovered this feature yet)

My initial burst of enthusiasm was dampened by the big gap between the entry-level introductions (ProfStef tutorial, the introductory MOOC) and the sheer complexity of everything the image includes. I'm not a big-time Java developer, I certainly appreciate the elegance of the language and dev environment compared to, say, Python, but that huge list of packages and their Baselines in the left pane of the system browser makes it really difficult to tell where to get started. I attended an online Smalltalk meetup recently, and one of the veteran Smalltalkers there was preferentially rebasing his code on Cuis because he felt Pharo had become too heavyweight.

I also fear that leaning so heavily on a closed, corporate platform like Discord as the community hub may lead to tears in a few years. If you're leaning into the idea that "the community is the documentation," you're at Discord's mercy for community sustainment, on top of the already hairy problem of surfacing solutions from within the depths of a long-running discussion forum. Sure, running everything off of mailing lists + IRC like older open source projects do would be a clear step backwards, but being stuck with Discord has been a mild turn-off for me.

Finally, it's worth noting that development is spearheaded by folks in France and Latin America for whom English may not be their primary language. That doesn't affect their ability to do good work! It's totally worth reflecting on how something attempting to approximate natural-language programming in English ended up forked outside the Anglosphere! But I also feel like it'd be worth having an editor take a cleanup pass at future versions of the main ebooks. I've got both the books that Alexandre Bergel published through Apress, and they're both solid, but if the first-resort resources were up to the same standard, I think perhaps fewer people would come away with an unfavorable impression. Of course, that's over and above simply keeping them up to date as development progresses - I believe Pharo by Example is still on version 9?

> and one of the veteran Smalltalkers there was preferentially rebasing his code on Cuis because he felt Pharo had become too heavyweight.

Pharo has Iceberg integration. I always used the the functionality of Iceberg that said to load the repository from the .git folder itself as opposed to the repository living in the image. That way, I could do git from the command-line, which is especially important for rebasing as Iceberg doesn't have that feature yet.

I've noticed when it comes to Pharo, you need a hacker mentality. Because it lives in a VM, there are a lot of system programming concepts floating around. It's handy if you have that type of background.

Discord isn't the only part of the community. In Europe, the real backbone of the Pharo community is the academic world and the conferences they organize.

Start with the Finder and the Examples-category if you want to know how to do something, don't browse the full package list in the hope you'll stumble over something useful.

There are small communities outside the Discord having meetups and whatnot. Would probably be nice to have a Discourse-instance for a more documentation-like meeting place, but that requires money and volunteers doing moderation.

I enjoy that some docs and other resources aren't expressed in US:ian advertising lingo. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

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