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 fishâ¦? Whatâs the point of duplicating everything thatâs 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 Otherwise its just another thing that gets out of date very rapidly and we already have enough problems with that.
Iâd 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start with (after all - he has quite a few tutorials of his own, some of which I had followed - but I suspect they are out of date now themselves).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 studentâs 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
-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html