[ANN] Round 4 Results Are In

The competition is certainly getting more interesting and challenging.

I found that if I started from your website to reach the videos, they're a
lot more understandable, as the background info needed to comprehend what
we're seeing is spelled out more completely there.

On the whole, it's great to see a competition like this being supported and
implemented!  Hopefully it will bring in more developers.  And inspire more
competitions, too.

Any chance that the source code for one or more of the competitors will
become available after the competition has concluded?





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tbrunz wrote
Thanks! Much appreciated!

Yes, that was my goal, to inspire people to give Smalltalk (Pharo) a shot.

At this point, I'd like to present some comments from the participating
teams. Many of them found learning Pharo difficult, even though I presented
what I thought were pretty good learning resources (see https://jrmpc.ca/).
Did I leave out anything that would've been more helpful?

One team told me that they found the Pharo class library intractable due to
lack of documentation. I imagine this opinion was shared by other teams, as
well.

I think they were looking for something along the lines of this  GNU
Smalltalk Library Reference
<https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual-base/gst-base.html>  , a more
traditional style of documentation.

Frankly, I'm utterly amazed that the GNU Smalltalk people were able to
create this reference (kudos!), and I wish something similar existed for
Pharo (and Squeak and Dolphin).

In hindsight, perhaps I should've given them this library reference, but I
think it would've confused them because I'm sure there are
incompatibilities.



> Any chance that the source code for one or more of the competitors will
> become available after the competition has concluded?

Certainly, I can do that. I'll at least post the three winning team minds.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Richard



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Hi Richard,

I think this revelation points to another important impact that your
competition can have on spreading the use of Pharo in the community --
beyond the obvious one of raising awareness.

You now have a golden opportunity to collect valuable inputs from a large
group who are getting starting with Pharo.  They have a unique perspective
regarding the language & IDE learning process.  What helped them learn?
What hindered them?  What resources were useful, and why?  How did their
impressions of Pharo change from when they were first introduced to the
language/IDE?  What suggestions do they have for other newcomers?

Your one group found the class library intractable...  That's probably not
surprising; I tell those I'm introducing to Smalltalk that the hardest part
of learning any OOP language is learning the foundation class library (as
this is what you will build your code on top of).  And of course it's
intimidating.  I try to reassure them by pointing out that the developers of
Smalltalk realized this and have been contributing and improving tools
specifically designed to help programmers find the classes & methods they
need.  Which then leads to demonstrations of those tools.

Written documentation should help, of course, but what kind?  The class
comment type of documentation (much like Linux man pages) works well as a
reference and clarification for those already somewhat familiar with the
classes and their uses.  Does it work well for those unfamiliar with the
language?  Are they sufficiently easy to find?  The GNU Smalltalk reference
addresses this by grouping them together into one document.  Perhaps some
automation to extract these from Pharo and group/title them would be a way
to start?  (Better: Have an application that can "go both directions" so
that edits to either set of docs can be used to update the other.  Think how
important a tool that would be!)

How to improve on class comments as a means of learning (besides just
writing more class comments)?  The Pharo booklet series are a *big* help, as
are tutorials such as the MOOC.  Personally, I like to study examples of
well-written code to learn techniques, style, and structure.  Pharo
complicates this, however, due to the fact that the language and IDE are
intertwined.  It's also complicated because you don't have the typical
"synoptic view" that most text-based languages provide.  And there's more to
learn than just language syntax (which is "the easy part"); my point about
how to find resources is an example of this.  In a way, we need Pharo
booklets on subjects such as "How to use the Pharo toolset to find classes
you need", "Techniques for structuring & expressing common operations in
Pharo", etc.

I'm thinking that your groups could help with identifying where the
cognitive stumbling blocks are and inspire thinking about how best to
address them.  After all, your contestants currently are experts on the
subject of learning Pharo and applying it to solve a real-world problem for
the first time.  They're acutely aware of what helped & what hindered.  We
need to target the problem areas to make things easier for those coming
after.  I don't think it's as simple as "write more documentation"; the
question is "which kind of documentation" and "what types of learning tools"
will help most?

I'm very curious to see the "robot mind" code, so I hope some of them get
published.  (That will serve another purpose, by indicating how those who
are new to Smalltalk reason with its syntax and semantics for the first
time.)  It will be helpful to see the code for the "Organizer", too.  Not so
that we can duplicate it, but to help us with learning how to architect
applications like these.  The game itself can be a learning tool for more
than just the students in the competition!

Thanks,
-t



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