I can see now why you took interest in my ideas, seems we are driven by same motives. I want my project to make coding fun again and be a tool to very easily learn programming. I also want to join forces with people trying to achieve similar goals. They dont have to contribute to my code or me to theirs but at least we can make sure we dont overlap and we make our projects a part of a bigger ecosystem with the same general goals.

So any code you may come up with or any idea and documentation I am immediately interested in knowing what you come up with.

One area I probably wont work on, is game development. Not because I am not interested but because already the field I am working on , general graphics is big enough. But I am super interested in seeing pharo being used for game development and I am willing to integrate your project to my project so we have one unified approach that can benefit all pharo users and not trying to do the same thing in diffirent ways which for me at least is a waste of time. My goal is to avoid code replication as much as possible and unify as many projects as possible and if possible build a centralized healthy ecosystem where the user can find feature rich well tested tools with ease and good documentation.

By the way I am a big fan of "invent your own games with python" book and I keep recommending it to many people wanting to learn python and pygame. 

I dont know if its a problem of Squeak vs Pharo , personally from what I have seen I dont see why the code cant work for both. My choice for pharo is because I see a lot more active development happening in pharo than I see for squeak and obviously that is a big plus. Even the biggest project for Squeak , Scratch has abandoned Squeak and smalltalk in total in favor for Flash which is really sad.I am talking of course about Scratch 2.

But anyway, anything you create in the field of graphics, game development , teaching programming etc is an area that deeply interest me. I think we both are driven by the same motives to bring new blood to Smalltalk and not just us, by showing newcomers not only how fun Smalltalk is but also how easy and I think projects that are geared towards that direction are absolutely essential for Pharo if Pharo cares about being more popular than currently is.

I am still buried in pharo code and documentation , trying to make sense of all this weird looking code in a language I am not familiar with but still very much motivated and excited and joining forces with other people is even more motivating and still working on an interactive tutorial Tool ;)


From: Sebastian Nozzi <sebnozzi@gmail.com>
To: St�phane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>
Cc: Pharo Development <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr>
Sent: Tuesday, 27 November 2012, 20:56
Subject: [Pharo-project] just help :)

> 2012/11/25 St�phane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>:
> just help :)

This is what I would like to get involved in. Hopefully it can benefit
the project.

In order of personal interest:

==

1) Positioning Pharo as THE language to learn programming. With a "fun" touch.

Smalltalk is still an excellent language/environment to learn
programming and I think: if it can be learnt while having fun, the
better!

My idea is to write simple game-programming tutorials (board games,
puzzles, etc. like this - http://inventwithpython.com/ - but cooler).
I already started working on this, that's why I bugged you guys with
Morphic questions in the past.

What I would like to offer is the knowledge and tools to use Pharo as
a post-Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) for creative projects (games,
animations, stories, etc.). Conceptually similar to:
http://www.greenfoot.org/home - only it would be it would be Smalltalk
based ;-D.

I also would love to write educational software (disclaimer: I'm not a
school teacher or anything similar - although I imagine getting
involved in the area).

From the spirit I know that maybe Squeak is more the place to go...
And also that Pharo aims to be more enterprise/research oriented. I
don't discard my code running in Squeak, but I just happen to find
Pharo easier to use / develop in.

==

2) Writing small (but attractive/useful) sample apps

... to be useful for people/small companies and get devs hooked
(return-on-investment might be low?).

Examples: a TestLink clone, a time-tracker, a corporate
contact-database, a room reservation system, etc.

The idea is to use these apps as "troyan horses", and get devs
interested in Smalltalk/Pharo (the apps would be free and open-source,
to guarantee usage/adoption). Maybe to extend / customize them for
their needs. Increase mind-share (I assure you, it's needed! None of
my past/current colleagues knew what Smalltalk was, some confused it
with Lisp).

But I'm sure this won't happen without...

==

3) Writing (documenting) Pharo

From an "enterprise" point of view (how can I do X, because I need
this for a real-life project asap?).

I think there is a lot of work to be done here also. Documenting
classes, working on external documentation. Like how to interact with
OS processes/io, databases, deployment strategies, persistence
strategies, how to work in a team, etc.

For this I would like to collaborate in the "collaborative book". I
already have a list of things that could be added/improved, and I
think I would also learn a lot in the process. The only thing that
worries me is me not being a native English speaker (writer).

==

Some work involved in these areas overlap. Ideally I would combine all three.

So, these are the areas I would like to get involved in. It would be
great if it could benefit the project at large :-)

Best regards,


Sebastian