for me it is a yes and no situation, yes its very coold to have your entire system in your fingertips but Pharo has serious issues with code organisation and I find the lack of namespaces quite inconvenient. You have to be careful how to name your classes which does not sound to me very OOP friendly.��

Also the IDE does not handle spaggetification very well, sure you can find implementors , senders etc but if the execution chain is complex , welcome to spaggeti hell. But that is a problem with most other IDEs if not all as well. Problem is in this case that we have the very good rule of using sort methods which multiplies this problem and makes navigation even harder. Code becomes much easier to read per method and messages but much harder to understand in a bird eye view.

Some of that pain has been aleviated with the introduction of GTSpotter which I have praised quite a lot and I will continue to do so. But yeah there are more needed to be done in the department to make Pharo code navigation a more comfortable task.��

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 2:57 PM Vitor Medina Cruz <vitormcruz@gmail.com> wrote:
I dunno, maybe I���m weird, but I find the System Browser a fantastic way to explore the class library. If you find a class or method that isn���t well documented, write a comment and send a change request. Stef told me this ages ago. I might add, if you find a bug you should write a test that exercises the bug and submit it on fogbugz (the bug tracking system).

I will reference of response of mine to a similar opinion made by Richard: https://medium.com/@vitormcruz/i-disagree-it-is-much-harder-to-find-anything-in-the-environment-c6bdd44f6eea

My 2 cents.




On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:59 PM, john pfersich <jpfersich@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Oct 10, 2017, at 09:58, horrido <horrido.hobbies@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Interestingly, I'm getting a fair amount of pushback on this. Personally, I
> think it would be very helpful to have a live (updatable, so as to keep it
> current) reference page for the class library, something that developers can
> easily look up what they need. After all, most of the power of Pharo comes
> from the class library and we need to make it as accessible as possible to
> less experienced Pharoers (i.e., beginners).
>
> Exploring the class library through the System Browser is very inefficient.
> This is further exacerbated by the fact that many classes and methods are
> simply not well-documented (containing a cursory remark which is just barely
> useful).
>
I dunno, maybe I���m weird, but I find the System Browser a fantastic way to explore the class library. If you find a class or method that isn���t well documented, write a comment and send a change request. Stef told me this ages ago. I might add, if you find a bug you should write a test that exercises the bug and submit it on fogbugz (the bug tracking system).

> I realize that creating a live reference page is not easy to do. In fact,
> it's a lot of work. But the absence of such a page is a real obstacle to
> Pharo acceptance.
>
>
>
> horrido wrote
>> Thanks. I gave your answer verbatim. I also added the following paragraph:
>>
>> The problem I find with today���s developers is that they are rather
>> closed-minded. They are rigid and inflexible, and not willing to adapt to
>> new and different ways of doing things. In my generation (circa
>> 1980���1990),
>> people didn���t have a problem with trying different technologies. That���s
>> why
>> I had no issue with learning Smalltalk 10 years ago, after I had retired
>> from a 20-year-long career in C systems programming and FORTRAN scientific
>> programming.
>>
>>
>>
>> Sven Van Caekenberghe-2 wrote
>>>> On 6 Oct 2017, at 14:54, horrido &lt;
>>
>>> horrido.hobbies@
>>
>>> &gt; wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I received this comment from someone who complained:
>>>>
>>>> *What about the lack of documentation? From time to time I���ve checked
>>>> some
>>>> SmallTalk implementations like Squeak, GNU-Smalltalk and now Pharo. Of
>>>> these, only GNU-SmallTalk appears to have a free, official programming
>>>> guide
>>>> and core library reference that any serious programmer expects from a
>>>> language.
>>>>
>>>> https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual-base/html_node/*
>>>>
>>>> I pointed to Pharo's documentation but then he came back with:
>>>>
>>>> *Then show me a link of the free, maintained reference documentation for
>>>> the
>>>> classes that form ���the core library���, like this one for Python
>>>> (https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html)*
>>>>
>>>> It's true, most Smalltalks do not have a core library reference, not
>>>> even
>>>> VisualWorks! So what is the proper response to this complaint?
>>>
>>> The first answer is that Pharo/Smalltalk is unique in that a running
>>> system/IDE contains _all_ source code, _all_ documentation (class,
>>> method,
>>> help, tutorial), _all_ unit tests and _all_ runnable examples in a very
>>> easy, accessible way. It takes some getting used to, but this is actually
>>> better and much more powerful than any alternative.
>>>
>>> The second answer is that there are lots of books and articles that take
>>> the classic/structured book/paper approach. There is
>>> http://books.pharo.org, http://themoosebook.org,
>>> http://book.seaside.st/book, http://medium.com/concerning-pharo and many
>>> more.
>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>