On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 12:41 PM, Martin Bähr < mbaehr@email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
nice ideas. though beginners may not have any favourite projects. are there any stats on which projects are popular so those can be chosen for testing?
You're right. I think by 'favorite', I meant more like 'areas you care about in general, even outside of Pharo'. For example, say you're interested in data processing in general. You can ask, "How would I go about downloading a comma-separated (CSV) file, read it into Pharo, and display a graph?" This involves learning how to do File I/O, checking to see if there's a CSV library compatible with Pharo, and checking to see what sort of graphing libraries exist (I believe one was mentioned recently on the mailing list, Roassal or something). In similar vein, you can check out XML parsers, JSON parsers, etc, etc. Or you can ask "How do I connect to a relational database? I've heard Glorp mentioned, and OpenDBX, etc, so which of these would actually work in Pharo 4?". Or, For example, maybe you care about social media APIs. You can then think, "Hey I wonder if there are any Twitter or Facebook client libraries for Pharo. Maybe there's an Open Social API ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial ) library that I can check out." That sort of thing.
* Write blog posts in general! Write tutorials and walkthroughs on how to use some of the new 4.0 features.
same problem here, being new to pharo, i would not even know what the new
features are. this should be documented in release-notes probably.
Of course, understood. Then write posts about new user impressions of Pharo 4 (keeping in mind the usual "this is open source software" / "the devs are busy so don't be too harsh on them" sort of stuff). Or short tutorials on the various small things that you've figured out to do. (Like a cron job that fires up your Pharo image on the command line).