On the permanent noob front: I have years of experience as a beginning skier. I like it that way: no broken bones. Besides, I don't get to do it often enough to develop an attitude about it.
As for Smalltalk in general, I have pointed new users to the Digitalk tutorials, telling them to stop when they reach the graphics, after which I started them into specific projects with lots of mentoring until they "got it." Visual Basic, PHP, Java, any # language except maybe S#, R (statistics), etc., all try to be easy to use. Hello world is a mere line or two, and teaches NOTHING. Understanding of Smalltalk comes a little slowly, but the rewards are immense (as you all know). Visual Basic has syntax for everything one might want to do; once dug out of documentation or a forum post, the trick of the day might not be useful for much else. Everything is easy: learning to do anything is a daunting task. The things to be learned about Smalltalk are comparatively few and invariably widely applicable; there are some specialized techniques (FFI, finalization), but very few tricks. Smalltalk is (mostly) consistent throughout, and its inconsistencies (Character, SmallInteger, #ifTrue:ifFalse:, MetaClass) are hidden fairly well and, with hindsight, make sense IMHO. Exception handling is new since Smalltalk 80, it is done wonderfully and fits with Smalltalk style. The newbie sees some "syntax" - we see #on:do: sent to a block, note the elegance, and get back to work. Traits are new and welcome. I am not saying that we can't extend the system; I think we should be careful about changing the language. Does Alan still have that piece of paper with the original specification? Pharo can use some work, of course. I am still overwhelmed when I begin to create a GUI for something, probably because I have written only two or three of them. I have some scraps of code that are learning toward an MVP framework. Just this past week, I encountered some communications code (non-graphical) that needed an aspect value adapter. I wrote a simple one, which is another piece of that puzzle. Things worth learning take effort. I doubt we can get around that. We can offer good tutorials, and where the tutorials look scruffy, make the code better. Bill ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Germán Arduino [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 9:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Vision I understand the sense of your words. And I agree with the need of a more easy to understand/extend system......I think that is a thing we need in these days, may be with some helper tools, I don't know, but I hear a lot of times people saying "No, I had a look to (put here Squeak/Pharo/Dolphin/other flavour) but was not able of develop anything". I know most of this sensation has to do with knowledgment about OO technology, but still if we can have a lower intro barrier, may be better for a lot of people (myself included of course.... in topics as .... Morphic :) ). Just my thoughts. Another forever newbie: Germán :) 2011/1/29 Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]>: > Hi guys > > Some days ago we were chatting with igor and he made an interesting remark > about a kind of hidden philosophy > behind pharo: the idea that we systematically want to make the system better. > In fact I realized that what we are doing is to make a system nice, robust > and powerful so that everybody can use > to realize their goals. But we want to have a system where not only smart > guys can manage to do something with it but also > less talented people like me (I know that some of you will say but stef you > are good, I'm a newbie in a lot of domains but > I learn fast if I can get a chance to avoid to bump on the walls). I want a > system that let me learn from itself. > I think that lot of things fall naturally in place from this vision > (documentation, oo practices - not having car inheriting from wheel, tests > comments, adequate abstractions, modularity). I want a system that everybody > can nicely build his own software. > So in short I want pharo to be like a nice garden with greenhouses for > building new garden with tools versus a jungle where > only skilled adventurers can make it through. > > Stef >
