From what I have seen pharo on stackoverflow has becoming less and less active when we created the Slack channel. Also this mailing list helps a lot.

I used to be a supporter of stackoverflow but I have to agree with others, its moderation is beyond stupid. I also found some tricks to make managing the mailing list easier, I created filters in my gmail account to gather anything concering pharo and put it in one place and I use Thunderbird to make the experience smoother. Mailing list and Slack is all we need. On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 11:23 AM stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:

Hello Milan

Re: Pharo 5 accented chars bug/regression.eml

Sujet :

Re: Pharo 5 accented chars bug/regression

De : Milan Vavra <vavra_milan@yahoo.com> <vavra_milan@yahoo.com>

Date : 12/6/16 21:50

Pour : pharo-users@lists.pharo.org

I have debugged the issue and figured out how to fix it. I have seen it as an opportunity to learn Pharo debugging and I did learn a few tricks on the way. It took me 2 full days of debugging.

Thanks for your time. This is important because most of us are not fluent with encodings, especially me :)

It is a simple fix that works for all the Pharo versions on Windows that have this problem. Including Pharo 6 without Nicolai's fix applied. And it does not break any shortcuts as far as I can tell.

Super!

I was so proud of myself.

You can! Could you sign the license agreement

http://pharo.org/contribute

I thought I deserved some recognition. And I still do. It is not that someone else could not do it. I am sure that many people would be able to do that as well. But I did take the time to do it. And it worked. I kind of would have liked to be able to point to it and say "I fixed that".

I know that feeling :) and this is great that you could do it.

I thought stackoverflow.com might be a good place for that. I was wrong. Having had my stackoverflow.com post attacked by aggressive incompetent anonymous down voters who were interested in down voting but possess no sense of humor or knowledge of Pharo or Smalltalk I think I understand now that stackoverflow.com is overrated.

You are the not the first one to get such bad experience. I do not understand why people are that stupid.

I don't think a site that actively encourages that kind of behavior deserves to benefit from my fix in any way. I would need a whole bunch of sympathizers to overturn the downvoting. I am not sure it is worth anybody's time.

I understand now that mailing lists have several good qualities thatstackoverflow.com does not have: posts can not disappear. People can not anonymously make you look bad even if they are incompetent in the subject matter.

Don't get me wrong. I'm ok with being told that I'm ugly or stupid if I understand what it is that is disliked.

We are not like that. Pharo is our systems and people are here to improve it. Open a bug entry on fogbugz and people will comment positively.

http://pharo.org/contribute

But I do not like places where anonymous bullying is actively encouraged. Hey I even got a 'Peer Pressure' badge for deleting my down voted post.

This is why we do not really like people having strong opinion while being anonymous. You can have a strong feeling but not bashing for bashing.

So much for context.

I understand that Nicolai is working on a fix of his own. The preliminary version for future Pharo 6.0 shows promise. With it, it is possible to type all the russian characters. Even with the fix it is not possible to type the Latin 'č' but I guess that can be fixed too.

Back to business:

Is there anyone out there using Pharo 3, 4, 5 or 6 on Windows that would benefit now from being able to type the characters č, Č, ě or Russian Ё, Л, М, Н, О, П in Workspace/Playground and System Browser?

It would be nice for Pharo 5. Since it will be the official version for about more than a year.

I guess I would like to know how to get this fixed with my fix and get some visibility in the process. If there is any interest.

Milan

-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-5-accented-chars-bug-regression-tp4898863p490055... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Thank you all, your feedback is appreciated. You have raised many points and so I probably won't be addressing them all. But thanks again for all. I did read all the responses. I will re-read them for more inspiration. I understand posting on this list is like going into a room with over a 100 people and saying something. So if 100 people spend 10 minutes to read this - that's a lot of minutes. So I don't want to waste your time. Feel free NOT to read this. But if you do read this, there is an attempt at a joke towards the end. You might even find it funny. Or not. I'm posting this through Nabble and it seems to post everything I post twice. Once as 'Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list' and as 'Milan Vavra' too. I have no idea why. Enlighten me if you can. My original motivation was and is to be able to show to a potential employer before and/or during the interview the sort problem fixing that I can do. Even should the job have nothing to do with Smalltalk or Pharo (then it might be an opportunity for a little Pharo/Smalltalk evangelism but I digress). If there is an easy way to show that version X has a problem - then I can show that I have the skills to fix that. If it is fixed in the meantime I can just point to the fixed version Y and say: "yeah, I fixed that". If there is some supporting evidence that should give more credibility to my other claims that are unverifiable due to the fact that they involved proprietary code that I just can not show anyone. So their value in an interview is limited because it depends on trust or a reference from someone else (trust again but vested in the reference). But the Pharo fix should be an independently verifiable claim. Of course there is a chance that I hired someone to fix that issue for me and I don't have the skills. So a few follow up questions should be in order to see whether or not I know what I am talking about. On positive feedback. I think negative feedback is ok. Please do give me negative feedback. I can take it. It can point me to perceived problems I were not aware of. What I do want however is ***constructive*** feedback. Actionable feedback. If you have a strong opinion state it clearly but it should be of the kind: "To do [thing] is stupid/ugly/whatever. We/you should do [something else] because [explanation]." I think Peter raised the issue: "is it fair that everyone gets mentioned even though their contributions are not comparable". I am not ashamed to say: "YES!". However it is not the same as saying that what I can (potentially, you have not seen it yet) do is more valuable than what others did in making Pharo happen in the first place. I had a minor role in the movie. But I deserve a place in the credits. If there were no you (all of you who have contributed so far) Pharo would not be what it is today. A sexy development environment. If there were no me, someone else would have to step up and do what I did. I am fully aware of that. Me trying to contribute is a "thank you" of sorts to all of you. Small contribution with big impact. In a way it is not that small a contribution considering the impact it can have on Pharo adoption. In Smalltalk "a little code goes a long way". Consider this scenario, a true story: I first downloaded my first Pharo back when 3.0 was new. On Windows XP. I played with it a little. Got excited (sooooo sexy!). But then came the blow. What? I can not type č? Is my keyboard broken? Severed cable? No? Oh ok. It just won't let me. There goes my contact management application. Bummer. It seems the IDE is not used by anyone in the Czech Republic on Windows. Otherwise someone would have noticed. Oh. Well. I don't have the skill to debug this yet. I am not sure how to report this. Oh well let's wait until someone fixes this. And it gave me the impression Pharo 3.0 is immature technology. This could be happening in any country that uses č as part of their language - Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovakia (Russia, Bulgaria, Croatia - for the russian characters). A year later Pharo 4.0 came out and it still was not fixed. Then Pharo 5.0 - same story. I have been learning Smalltalk in small steps on Squeak and Pharo trying things from SBE and PBE and my contact management example based on an excellent video by Laurent Laffont. To cut a long story short only this month I have reached the point that I was thinking maybe now I have what it takes to fix this. And the excellent videos of the Pharo MOOC definitely played a part too. Thanks to everyone involved. Anyway I tried to debug this issue and it worked. So what if you were able to wave the magic wand to make that bug go away? I have that wand. I'll see if I can jump through the hoops of the contribution process although it might take some time. On a lighter note, I had a bright vision of how I could get some credit for being able to fix this. I would find hire some really hot hostess or two for an upcoming Pharo conference in Prague. They would have the following on their T-shirts. One: 'č, Č, ě, Anyone?' and the other 'Ё ,Л, М, Н, О, П, Anyone?' and 'Ask me how' on the back. :-). And their job would be to hand out my email address to anyone interested. Or even point to me standing in the distance. I bet they would command some attention. Mentoring. It would be nice to know how to find a mentor for the contribution process, possibly beyond. Thanks for your attention, Milan -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-5-accented-chars-bug-regression-tp4898863p490087... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.