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Pharo 11

pharo.org

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Re: Pharo 11

#151

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[flagged]

Because the project competes for attention with a million other OSS projects out there and lowering the barrier to entry for newcomers is good practice for projects that want to stay alive.

I certainly agree that it would be a good thing to do for their own sake, but also at the same there is an amount of effort required. If someone is so lazy and has such a low attention span that they can't even be bothered to find the tutorial before deleting it, were they really going to stick with it anyway? It seems like such a low bar. I honestly think people are just spoilt by these modern FOSS projects with insanely good documentation. You just can't expect that everywhere

Also, frankly, Pharo has its niche. It isn't really competing for attention in the same way as others, since it is the "goto big Smalltalk"

Re: Pharo 11

#152

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[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.

So, to be clear, you are saying that it is indecent that there isn't a notice on their page saying "this project is not for lazy people. Please go away if you are too lazy to find the tutorial"? I really don't think that is more decent

Re: Pharo 11

#153

> Ephemerons Production Ready. Does anyone have any insight into this development? What impact on GC performance?

Some materials: https://github.com/pharo-project/pheps/blob/main/phep-0003.m... https://thepharo.dev/2021/04/07/a-taste-of-ephemerons/ But I do not know if Guille has some benchmarks.

It depends on how many objects you installed the ephemerons. We tested with hundreds of thousands of ephemerons and we saw performance problems. We instrumented the code to capture all object allocations of an application. But, if you use ephemerons with not so many objects, let's say a couple of houndreds max, you should not have any issue.

Re: Pharo 11

#154

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Until I watched this I never understood class definitions in Pharo. His "we tell the TestClass to create a subclass of itself" blew my mind.

What's the usefulness of that?

The congruence with the rest of the language. It makes it so that creating a new class isn't declarative, but also just another message sent to the ecosystem of objects.

Re: Pharo 11

#155

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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…

Most people have Expectations about the way things work - code in a text editor, write tests, run them. Check code into Github. Go to a website to find documentation. Pharo defies all of those conventions (well, maybe not Github, but even that is unusual). People just aren't accustomed to in-IDE tutorials. It doesn't even occur to people that such things might exist. It's hard to notice that which you never even imag…

> People just aren't accustomed to in-IDE tutorials. It doesn't even occur to people that such things might exist.

Well, yeah. But it opens when you open an image for the first time. It's right there in plain view. The first thing you see on the website are "discover" "download" and "learn" buttons. It's all these in plain view; it's not hidden away.

Re: Pharo 11

#156

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 like the LearnXinYminutes series to get the hang of a new language. It's sussinct and usually covers the main aspects of the language -- at least sufficient for you to decide if it's interesting enough to spend more time on...

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/smalltalk/

Re: Pharo 11

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Authors of open source projects don’t owe you anything. If you want something changed, do it yourself, or ask them. You could even go so far as to offer to pay them. If you aren’t up for any of that, well… not sure what to tell you!

> If you want something changed, do it yourself, or ask them.

I did ask. See my other comment[1]. The only thing I got out of asking was name calling, dismissive and rude remarks, and the immortal "do it yourself". Before the package manager thing, I did the same - years earlier - asking on the mailing list how to bind keys to commands. What I got out of this was name calling, dismissive and rude remarks, and the immortal "learn to use the mouse already!"

Sure, nobody owes anything to anybody, not even not being toxic and abrasive. But I also don't owe the toxic and abrasive community anything - certainly not avoiding criticizing it. Right?

Oh, and I'm certainly NOT going to offer money to people who swear at me. Yeah, it's not a product, not developed by a company, all true - but I still refuse to be called an idiot and keep quiet about it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35906419

Re: Pharo 11

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have Expectations about the way things work - code in a text editor, write tests, run them. Check code into Github. Go to a website to find documentation. Pharo defies all of those conventions (well, maybe not Github, but even that is unusual). People just aren't accustomed to in-IDE tutorials. It doesn't even occur to people that such things might exist. It's hard to notice that which you never even imag…

> People just aren't accustomed to in-IDE tutorials. It doesn't even occur to people that such things might exist. Well, yeah. But it opens when you open an image for the first time . It's right there in plain view. The first thing you see on the website are "discover" "download" and "learn" buttons. It's all these in plain view; it's not hidden away.

This was not my experience. In fact, on my windows box the latest Pharo Launcher fails nearly silently when trying to launch both the MOOC image and the Pharo 11 base image. When attempting to launch an image, A piece of toast (to borrow an androidism) would show up in the bottom left saying "Launch, Ctrl+L" for roughly 1 second, fade away, and then nothing would happen.

I had to switch to my Mac to get it to properly launch. The Pharo onboarding experience needs work.

Re: Pharo 11

#159
post #135

Installing and running Pharo when new release has been introduced; however, yet, Pharo does not support HiDPI screen and disappointed. Other than this, this project and other projects dependent on this, especially, http://agilevisualization.com/ is looking great to me. Once, I had used Squeak MVC for my company's internal projects (though it has been replaced with Common Lisp applications), and Smalltalk is very prod…

I hope Pharo developers find time to fix this. HiDPI and variable DPIs are way too common and it does put users off to work with fuzzy/tiny UIs.

Re: Pharo 11

#160
post #117

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> On my Linux machine releases after 5 refused to as much as display anything That seems close to misrepresentation, Pharo works OK. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... Pharo 9.0.21 on quad-core 3.0GHz Intel® i5-3330® with 15.8 GiB of RAM and 2TB SATA disk drive; using Ubuntu™ 22.10 x86_64 GNU/Linux 5.19.0-29-generic

Quoting from your link: COMMAND LINE: /opt/src/pharo-vm-Linux-x86_64-stable/pharo --headless [...] Yeah. It indeed works. With --headless. It's "just" incapable of displaying GUI. I use Fedora. I ran every other available Smalltalk implementation on it, including Visual Age. GToolkit distribution, too, worked without problems. Pharo didn't, and still doesn't. I know that wanting this to be fixed is lazy of me and sho…

Do those script files work with your Fedora Pharo install?
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