Posted by Trygve on Mar 26, 2020; 3:02pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/ANN-JRMPC-Poll-tp5113723p5113939.html

Could the class documentation you are looking for be generated automagically from the class comments? The first para could be a blurb describing the purpose of the class. The resulting document could be searchable.
--Trygve

I didn't ask them that, but I did provide the link to PBE. It was up to them
to learn any way they wish.

You can't mandate people to read PBE. You can lead a horse to water but you
can't make it drink.

PBE is not a good resource if you want to look up classes that you need for
your application. Just as you guys provide a quick reference for Pharo
syntax, you should provide a quick reference for the class library, too.
That would definitely ease the learning curve.

All programming languages rely on a "standard library" (in our case, a
standard class library). No self-respecting language would lack a standard
library reference, whether we're talking about C, C++, C#, Java, Python,
etc.  Even GNU Smalltalk understood this.
<https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual-base/gst-base.html>  



Richard O'Keefe wrote

I am a little confused here.  I originally learned Smalltalk from the
coloured books and
then Inside Smalltalk.  When I got the chance to use Squeak, pretty
much everything
from those books carried over well enough for me to hit the ground
running.  There are
lots of free e-books about Smalltalk, not least Pharo By Example.  Had
these people
who were polled read PBE?

On Thu, 26 Mar 2020 at 04:49, horrido <

horrido.hobbies@

> wrote:

This is what I provided the JRMPC participants: https://jrmpc.ca/ (see
"How
to learn Smalltalk programming"). I'm not sure how I could've done
better,
though.

You make an excellent point about duplication and keeping documentation
up-to-date. However, there has to be some middle ground that makes it
easier
and more convenient for new developers to find the tools they need.
Perhaps
a synoptical reference showing the more common classes used, such as
collections, web-related classes, time-related classes, exception and
error
classes, file system-related classes, process-related classes, and so on.
These classes ought not to change much, if at all.



Tim Mackinnon wrote

Or we teach people to fish…? What’s the point of duplicating everything
that’s already in the image anyway - we just need to be cleverer or

ensure

that people know to look there and have the right onboarding experience

to

do that? Otherwise its just another thing that gets out of date very
rapidly and we already have enough problems with that.

I’d be interested in what intro material Richard gave the students to
start with (after all - he has quite a few tutorials of his own, some

of

which I had followed - but I suspect they are out of date now

themselves).

When you launch pharo there is the helpful welcome screen - did the
student’s actually use it and follow what it says?

And did we see any of them in this forum (or was that against the

rules?)

Tim

On 24 Mar 2020, at 17:28, Ben Coman <

btc@

> wrote:

Pharo has some good documentation, but its more lesson-based than a
library reference.
Those of us familiar with Pharo know the tricks to use the system

itself

as that reference, but I'd imagine this is an unfamiliar workflow for
newcomers.

I have seen before a class library reference generated from the image,
but I couldn't put my hands on it right now.
@all, is it still being generated?. This might provide newcomers
something more familiar to work with.

cheers -ben

On Tue, 24 Mar 2020 at 03:00, Richard Kenneth Eng <

horrido.hobbies@

 <mailto:

horrido.hobbies@

>> wrote:

https://jrmpc.ca/2020/03/20/what-makes-learning-smalltalk-challenging/

<https://jrmpc.ca/2020/03/20/what-makes-learning-smalltalk-challenging/>

FWIW, 95% of respondents pointed to the lack of reference

documentation

for the class library as the major obstacle to learning

Smalltalk/Pharo.

Richard

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