Hi Ted,

Hi Offray,

I think you're addressing many of the same concerns as I am, with more of a
web/browser orientation perhaps...

Which is good.  Pharo can make nice, interactive web sites as well as nice,
interactive documents, can it not?

For me web is kind of an "exportation format" as I dislike pretty much programming and writing in the native formats and languages that entangle the web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and they seem to me as verbose and/or inelegant. But web is an ubiquitous platform so thinking in it as a "compilation target" seems wise. I will try to Live code as much as I can in Pharo and export interactive documents to PDF and HTML as needed. That's the approach we have followed here so far and it had worked, so it will be the one we use for the indie web[1] workshops powered by Pharo.

[1]https://indieweb.org/

 I think that we still can make a compelling case for wider audiences 
about Pharo and making it more visible.

I agree!  What do the 'wider audiences' need?  What will attract their
attention?  Being visible is necessary, but is it sufficient?  How can we
make them want to learn this new tool?  (Everyone is so strained for time,
and attention is hard to come by these days...)

Totally agree. We have this "attention economy" and almost everything/everyone is sending notifications and messages. Focused attention and effort are a luxury these days.

In the case of grassroots communities, they have huge necessities but they're not a "compelling market". So what solves their needs is the stuff that will attract their attention and working with them and their needs is the best way to inquiry about this. Because we are in a Hackerspace and not in a startup or research facility, we are pretty close with such communities. Retaking the upcoming Indie Web workshop was a product of our voluntary work with grassroots communities. Grafoscopio interactive notebooks are a way to "package" expert knowledge in a low barrier way for non programmers in such communities. They can open and run the notebook and its nodes as they need and the output will be an updated web site that addresses their web presence needs not covered by big corp social media or overcomplicated CMS. The interactive notebook produces a static web site. And the idea is to use personalization of such community web sites via interactive notebooks to introduce them to programming (I will share more details as I have them).

agility and resilience are not properties of the
overcomplicated web of today

So, so true... 

.. making suggestions and helping us to improve the software 
engineering parts behind such problems/projects,

I am also interested in contributing to that.  Better tools & methods for
solving the problems, better documentation to further understanding and
engagement, and better ways for users to employ the results.

Thanks a lot :-)! I will be sharing the interactive notebooks we do and the software packages we create/modify for the Indie Web Worshops and the problems and solutions as they arise. While notebooks and workshops documentation will be mostly in Spanish, the code will be in English, so I think that this is a good bridge exercise and give us this intermediate level tutorials for Pharo.

One of the things I like the most about Pharo and I remember and share in local workshops from�� Markcus' Nomads do not build Cathedrals talk[2] is the idea that to solve mode complex problems we need to change the infrastructure behind the projects. I tell the workshop attendants that Pharo's uniformity and readability is key to understand and traverse increased complexity in the platform (there is also a fight to decrease incidental complexity that is deeply rooted in Smalltalk cultures). So even if the "intermediate level" tutorials are a moving target the fact that we read/extend the infrastructure in a similar fashion, despite its complexity could help to address increasing complexity problems with such intermediate level entry knowledge, at least at the beginning.



[2] https://www.slideshare.net/MarcusDenker/2014-esugcathedral

Cheers,

Offray