If I may give my unsolicited two cents as well, I agree, the biggest barrier to adoption is the roadblock of not understanding a system. And pharo and smalltalk are large complex systems that deviate from the average programming environment norm.
For those that aren't paid to research, free time and energy to explore and accidentally gain an understanding of pharo is sparse and costly. Documentation is the only thing that can alleviate that problem. If good documentation allows for more people to use the system then you will have more developers helping out on the next iterations of pharo. Victor Stan On Apr 6, 2013 2:35 PM, "Thomas Worthington" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:10:26 +0100, Marcus Denker <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> >> I'm also not attempting to say that those who are very active with Pharo >>> are bad programmers because documentation has become problematical - if >>> they are then I'm a bad programmer too - I just want to point out that a >>> system has even more need of documentation than a completed application and >>> *if it's possible* (and I know that finance is an issue in the real world) >>> then I think that updating the Pharo book(s) to a point where they describe >>> the current Pharo 2.0 state is FAR more important than work on Pharo 3.0. >>> >> >> >> We need both. Documentation is important, but just documenting a system >> that nobody needs makes no sense, either. >> >> > I would agree. I don't think that Pharo2.0 counts as a system that nobody > needs, though. I'm paid to develop for Moodle, a vast PHP-based e-learning > project and I can assure you that the world is full of people who need a > proper OO development system! > > Obviously there's a balance to be had, but I don't think that it's too > radical to suggest that a major version bump should be followed by a period > of consolidation in the documentation before proceeding. > > TW > >
