71–80 of 189 posts
I got curious, downloaded and installed it on my computer. Checked the docs, and the next step was to download a stable image. Downloaded 11 (stable) and started it. Then blank stare to screen! What should I do? Lots of things to click on, and no text editor.. Searched for a tutorial on the website, and found nothing! I don't want to spend 30 minutes to look at some random videos of Virtual Reality in Thames or whate…
I got curious, downloaded and installed it on my computer. Checked the docs, and the next step was to download a stable image. Downloaded 11 (stable) and started it. Then blank stare to screen! What should I do? Lots of things to click on, and no text editor.. Searched for a tutorial on the website, and found nothing! I don't want to spend 30 minutes to look at some random videos of Virtual Reality in Thames or whate…
Pharo by Example is a good book to start with.
36 years ago a very young me took a programming class in 3rd grade where learned "Small Talk", which was going to be how everybody worked with computers in the future. I still credit most of my skill at programming to the fact that I was introduced to that and Forth in elementary school. I also miss those C64s....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pharo, like other smalltalks, doesn't really have much of a text editor - that's not how you write smalltalk code. instead, you use the browser, which has a text pane, to change/add things to classes (or indeed to objects). you have to think a bit different. and how do you expect to learn anything if you won't read or watch a tutorial?
Serious question: Can you create medium-size to large applications without a text editor?
Extreme TDD is amazing - you write a test, run it, and when it fails you basically fill in the chunk of code right from the error window and continue. It's not always super obvious how to get into the flow, but I found that although I didn't feel productive enough with the Pharo ecosystem, I _really_ miss the smalltalky development flow which foregoes using text files to organize code.
I got curious, downloaded and installed it on my computer. Checked the docs, and the next step was to download a stable image. Downloaded 11 (stable) and started it. Then blank stare to screen! What should I do? Lots of things to click on, and no text editor.. Searched for a tutorial on the website, and found nothing! I don't want to spend 30 minutes to look at some random videos of Virtual Reality in Thames or whate…
While there are certainly folks doing other things in it, the Pharo project focuses on the problems of improving the Pharo project to make it easier to develop Pharo.
As with many OSS projects, the developers are there to scratch their itches, which is Pharo, not just random programming projects.
You'd like to think that these goals, improving the development experience, would be generic enough to "lift all boats". I mean, they do solve a lot of issues with Smalltalk distributed development, distribution, source code control, etc. But, to be honest, those are all advanced cases and, while part of the development experience, don't do much to attract developers who are doing distribute "IDE" development.
I've tried several times to work with Pharo as a tool for random GUI apps, and found the experience quite frustrating. But, clearly, the Pharo developers continue to make progress, its just that whatever their destination is, it's not congruent with mine, so I dabble and leave.
If you want a more friendly approach to Smalltalk (which, you'll note, Pharo does not claim to be -- there's no mention of Smalltalk on their front page), then take a look at Squeak.
36 years ago a very young me took a programming class in 3rd grade where learned "Small Talk", which was going to be how everybody worked with computers in the future. I still credit most of my skill at programming to the fact that I was introduced to that and Forth in elementary school. I also miss those C64s....
Wow my highschool didn't even offer programming classes. The closest thing to a computer education were some classes that required us take online tests to obtain Microsoft Office and/or Adobe Photoshop "certifications" before we could graduate.
1. The font is blurry (upd: solved by increasing "SDL2 Screen Scale Factor Base DPI" in settings)
2. ~/Pharo/images is being created even though I changed all paths in settings
Anyone knows how to solve this?
I got curious, downloaded and installed it on my computer. Checked the docs, and the next step was to download a stable image. Downloaded 11 (stable) and started it. Then blank stare to screen! What should I do? Lots of things to click on, and no text editor.. Searched for a tutorial on the website, and found nothing! I don't want to spend 30 minutes to look at some random videos of Virtual Reality in Thames or whate…
Why does this seem so common in niche projects like this one? I often see GitHub repos that seem very interesting and even quite liked but as a newcomer you're just supposed to figure everything out blindly by yourself. P.S: Thanks for saving me the time to download and try out Pharo.
Lots of FOSS is written that way, especially corporate PR FOSS, where engagement and other things are important, because otherwise the cost/value calculation doesn't work out yadda yadda.
But lots of other FOSS is released just because someone wrote something, and then just put it out for others to use, if they're curious. They don't owe you anything, and spending time working on the onboarding UX, tutorials or guides might detract from what they wanted to do: entertain themselves solving a problem they care about.
I got curious, downloaded and installed it on my computer. Checked the docs, and the next step was to download a stable image. Downloaded 11 (stable) and started it. Then blank stare to screen! What should I do? Lots of things to click on, and no text editor.. Searched for a tutorial on the website, and found nothing! I don't want to spend 30 minutes to look at some random videos of Virtual Reality in Thames or whate…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pharo, like other smalltalks, doesn't really have much of a text editor - that's not how you write smalltalk code. instead, you use the browser, which has a text pane, to change/add things to classes (or indeed to objects). you have to think a bit different. and how do you expect to learn anything if you won't read or watch a tutorial?
> how do you expect to learn anything if you won't read or watch a tutorial? I wanted to follow a tutorial (or another guide) to learn about Pharo, but couldn't find any, at least in the official docs. That's the point I'm making!
Smalltalk in general is about a fully integrated environment, so everything lives inside of the environment, including applications, docs and also the tutorial.
Once you launched the Launcher, you create a image (latest stable, official distribution), launch the image, press the "Next" button until you see "You can learn Pharo by clicking on the following expression:" which launches the tutorial. That's about it.
And I did that the first time just now, without having any experience doing so in the past, or knowing 100% where to go. Everything was easily guessable. But I did know since before what a Smalltalk environment usually looks like, even though I haven't used Pharo specifically before for this.