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Pharo 11

pharo.org

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Re: Pharo 11

#101

Post by klibertp »

capableweb wrote: post #93
mock-possum wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I did the same the other night - same experience. It’s like releasing a modern game and expecting players to read the manual to learn how to play. We know how to effectively teach users to use - there’s an entire field of study devoted to usability and accessibility. I don’t have time to waste on something that ignores the last 40 years of progress in that realm.

What's to say they have "something" to waste on making a foolproof way of getting started for people who aren't even curious? They're not selling a product here, they're releasing software they've written in their own spare time. If you can't spare 30 minutes for running through the tutorial, why should they spend more time catering to you rather than spending it on more interesting problems?

> why should they spend more time catering to you rather than spending it on more interesting problems?

Of course, if you're content with your community stagnating and nobody ever using that software, then there's really no reason to put that effort in.

I remember similar arguments about Linux installers. Why should they cater to people who don't even know fdisk? We have kernel to work on, UX of an installer - with obvious, immediate impact on adoption and getting new users - is boring in comparison. Having installed Fedora last week I can attest that this line of thinking, fortunately, went away in Linux as far as installers go. The chances of it going away in the Pharo community, however, are slim at best.

Re: Pharo 11

#102

Post by IshKebab »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #59
jventura wrote: post #45

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…

The Pharo Launcher has an in IDE tutorial window that opens when you first open the image . Apart from links to documents it also contains an interactive in-development environment teaching you the basics. One of the images is the Pharo MOOC. The website has links to several documents to get you started. No offense but you kind of have to look around it to not find the ways in which the Pharo team attemps to get you…

In my experience if you think you've made something clear but people still don't see it, it's because you didn't really make it clear. There's no use blaming users for not looking hard enough even if you think it is really obvious.

Re: Pharo 11

#103

Post by IshKebab »

kragen wrote: post #88
jdthedisciple wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why should people spend their time trying to convince you of the value of their project? they already know if it's valuable; why should they be interested in your opinion? if it's a commercial product, they might get your money, but most projects on github aren't

Because they want other people to use it obviously. Why share it with the world at all if that's not the case?

Re: Pharo 11

#104

Post by klibertp »

xept wrote: post #44
web3-is-a-scam wrote: post #18

As a rails developer - my introduction to Pharo started with this video: https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o If you're not a ruby/rails developer you can still see how awesome it is, but for rubyists specifically it can really be quite mind blowing.

I feel anxious looking at the multitude of windows. Do you get used to it?

No. This is easily the weakest part of Smalltalk IDEs. And with Morphic-based ones, you can't even fix it with a tiling window manager or something, since it's just one window for the rest of the OS. There's no way of organizing the windows in groups, no automatic placement, no virtual desktops. The best you can do is simply get into a habit of culling unnecessary windows. It's emotionally hard to close windows you spent 10 minutes searching in for the code you might (or might not) need in the future, so I made a simple sidebar[1] that I use to bookmark useful stuff. With it, I can close windows with impunity.

[1] https://klibert.pl/statics/smalltalk/sidebar.png

Re: Pharo 11

#105

Post by bowsamic »

klibertp wrote: post #97
bowsamic wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No need to, but the project should be honest about it: "this is not for lazy people! You'll spend a weekend just trying to boot the VM, and once you're done the hard part starts right there! So, go away, you unwanted user, you." Put something like that on the front page and you're good to go.

[flagged]

Re: Pharo 11

#106

Post by klibertp »

bowsamic wrote: post #105
klibertp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to, but the project should be honest about it: "this is not for lazy people! You'll spend a weekend just trying to boot the VM, and once you're done the hard part starts right there! So, go away, you unwanted user, you." Put something like that on the front page and you're good to go.

[flagged]

Ah, yes. "Entitlement"...

I'd say: to show that its authors have a sense of decency, at least. But let's not assassinate the lads any more than this.

Re: Pharo 11

#107

Post by kragen »

IshKebab wrote: post #103
kragen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why should people spend their time trying to convince you of the value of their project? they already know if it's valuable; why should they be interested in your opinion? if it's a commercial product, they might get your money, but most projects on github aren't

Because they want other people to use it obviously. Why share it with the world at all if that's not the case?

why would they want to keep it to themselves? maybe if it contains trade secrets or defamation or copyright infringement? but probably most code doesn't

i don't want other people to use my open source code unless it's more useful to them than the alternatives, and i think they're a better judge of that than i am; trying to convince them to use it would imply i think i'm a better judge of it than they are

i'm always happy to talk with them about it, but i'm not coming from an advocacy perspective, and i think people who are are bad

Re: Pharo 11

#108

Post by kragen »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #100
kragen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not that it doesn't have a text editor; most smalltalk windows have five or six text editors

Oh boy, how does one keep their sanity like that?!

you use the windows to keep them organized, same as in any other gui

Re: Pharo 11

#109

Post by pjmlp »

zabzonk wrote: post #89
whartung wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Pharo is an environment and tool designed and built by those who want to build Pharo. 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 the…

squeak is very similar to pharo (which is based on squeak) but pharo is a lot more user-friendly and looks nicer. they are both smalltalks - i agree that pharo trying to pretend otherwise is a bit strange.

Because in a similar vein to Dr. Scheme => Raket, Pharo has moved from its raw Smalltalk roots.

Re: Pharo 11

#110

Post by splitstud »

api wrote: post #36

Pharo looks like a blast from the past in a good way. It harkens back to the era when a lot of work was put into carefully designing language, IDE, and UI/UX environments cohesively with an eye toward using the computer to maximize human capability and productivity. Then we dumped all that and abandoned it and moved to today's visually and ergonomically inconsistent hodge podge. It mostly happened because of the web…

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