Behold Pharo: The Modern Smalltalk

I'm think that is important to remove barriers for developers coming from other environments based on files for development and documentation, but my path is different, is teaching people like journalist, hacktivist who has no previous or deep experience into developing. Starting with them, using Live Coding and mixing it with interactive documentation, scripting, and agile visualization, has been a powerful enabler. No need to think in the established tradition, because we're building our own, using alternative infrastructure to bootstrap ourselves into alternative futures.

Cheers,

Offray

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 10:39 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> wrote:

The more I use Pharo, the less I use web documentation.

That is a familiar path, but still an obstacle for people to get over in trying Pharo - i.e. its a barrier of entry.  I've previously referred to this article by JoelOnSoftware, but to pull out a key part... "Think of these barriers as an obstacle course that people have to run before you can count them as your customers. If you start out with a field of 1000 runners, about half of them will trip on the tires; half of the survivors won’t be strong enough to jump the wall; half of those survivors will fall off the rope ladder into the mud, and so on, until only 1 or 2 people actually overcome all the hurdles. With 8 or 9 barriers, everybody will have one non-negotiable deal killer.  This calculus means that eliminating barriers to switching is the most important thing you have to do if you want to take over an existing market, because eliminating just one barrier will likely double your sales. Eliminate two barriers, and you’ll double your sales again."

For example, Stef mentioned that the Pharo web docs were dropped because were't used much.  But perhaps their value is not for regular use by the community, but more for outsiders evaluating Pharo, or newcomers transitioning from their old workflow to a Pharo one.  In that case their value eliminating one barrier of entry is much greater than measured from the number of page hits.

btw, What I like about Richards's articles is that... most of our community's articles are for people already using Pharo, even if only a newcomer of a few days working through an introductory tutorial.  Richard's articles target outsiders and one of the side benefits for *me* is that it pulls in critical outside perspectives to remind me of the barriers-of-entry stopping people using Pharo.  

Take for instance the common angst people have against working in an Image in Smalltalk.  There are some legitimate concerns with ending up in a state you can't recreate, which we are addressing this with the bootstrapping projects.  But I think we might publicize this better to outsiders. For example... Mr Smith knows nothing about Smalltalk and takes an interest in Pharo.  Smith discusses with colleague Jones who presents a poor opinion of the Smalltalk Image approach. So Smith never tries Pharo!  Alternatively, if Smith has already read in an FAQ about this common argument and how we address it by our bootstrap process, he can inform Jones', and maybe now we've got two curious newcomers.  

cheers -ben

I completely agree with Ben.

As for Dimitris, I have some points:
[...]

The fact is , we love pain, we love barriers, we love doors that slam into our face. We love challange. But only if we find it interesting.

See, I think that’s not the point, the point is that people are very resistant to any change in their habits, so much that’s usually better to short-circuit into their habits to make a change instead of trying to force a hard change on them. That is why I think Ben point of view is not flawed at all, on the contrary, removing barriers is a way to make Pharo seems more like what people are habituated, short-circuiting peoples habits into Pharo usage. Withing time, people better understanding of Pharo may trigger small, but incremental, changes to it’s habits to get the “A-ha!!!” moment where live code and all wonders of Pharo make sense.

I frankly read very loosely the rest of you answer ( :) :P ), but I get you are not interested in making Pharo popular rather than get really interested, open minded people on borad so to make it even more amazing, but I also disagree here (in part  :) ). There are lot’s of people who could do better for the community if the entrance were easier, more popularity could means more opportunity in job field and, in a more philosophical matter, a way to make the whole current programming field better. Of course, with more popularity comes disadvantages as well, some of which you already said, which can be addressed, but if this is price to pay I personally think it is worth it.

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 4:00 AM, Dimitris Chloupis <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is a familiar path, but still an obstacle for people to get over in trying Pharo - i.e. its a barrier of entry.  I've previously referred to this article by JoelOnSoftware, but to pull out a key part... "Think of these barriers as an obstacle course that people have to run before you can count them as your customers. If you start out with a field of 1000 runners, about half of them will trip on the tires; half of the survivors won’t be strong enough to jump the wall; half of those survivors will fall off the rope ladder into the mud, and so on, until only 1 or 2 people actually overcome all the hurdles. With 8 or 9 barriers, everybody will have one non-negotiable deal killer.  This calculus means that eliminating barriers to switching is the most important thing you have to do if you want to take over an existing market, because eliminating just one barrier will likely double your sales. Eliminate two barriers, and you’ll double your sales again."

 

The learning curve of Smalltalk and Lisp are plain insane. Made learningh DOS Assembly a walk in the park in comparison. 

But frankly thats half of the fun. 

Many obstacles, many challanges. 

And there lies my point that an obstacle is a good thing when it becomes an interesting challange. You have to have at least a degree of masochism to learn how to code in any language. Of course the question is what makes an interesting challange and welcome to the abyss that is called "human brain". None knows and we are not anywhere close in finding out. 

What we know is that documentation is super important , whether you are a masochist or not, you need it to progress. Problems is that documentation is hard to create and maintain, again masochism required. So we should not just worry about making it easier for people to reach documentation we should make it easier for people to maintain it. Because even masochism has its limits. Those limits are as far it is a pleasureable pain. 

So congratulations to anyone reading this long post , you already proven my point.

A huge plus also for Pharo is the community and how welcoming it is, we take for granted but my experience with Python was not the best either. I joined the IRC channel, other than having to endure the stupidity of "say lol 3 times and you are banned" , too many wars over languages and how superior Python is than anything else. Guido is god and blah blah blah... No thanks. 

People here are open minded, still "religious" about Smaltalk but they actually want to help , not to teach, actually help. 

I think we are a bit too obsessed on how to make Pharo popular, Smalltalkers suffer from this insecurity of the "failure" of the "best language of the world" not only to become popular but also to convince coders that "is not a a relic of the past".  

But we are fine, documentation is doing grear, Pharo is improving rapidly , the community is welcoming as ever. All we need is embrace our successes and our failures, reject the hype, consider the crticism and accept it or reject it and generally carry on doing what we all love. 

Improving Pharo. 

;)

If you are working with Mac and Gnu/Linux, your quick start could start by:

1. Create the folder for your Pharo program, download it and Launch it. For that, open your Terminal and type:

```

I've encountered another issue, this time with the macOS download...

After I download the zip file, I unzip the file and move the Pharo
application to the Applications folder. Then I have to right-click on the
Pharo application and select open (double-clicking prevents me from opening
the file at all). This last step fails (Pharo crashes), but if I repeat it,
it works.

Thereafter, I may double-click to open the file anytime.

I can't add these instructions to my Pharo Quick Start guide without
sounding like an ass. I shall have to wait until all download issues are
resolved before I can complete the guide.




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Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html