you dont need to have a lot of experience to contribute, even with zero experience as a coder if you understand the basics you can at least contribute class comments. Contribution wise Pharo is quite flexible and if one is lost in the process people are more than happy to help him/her out. When I helped a Pharo student to learn , she was really suprised that I was so helpful but on the other hand when I joined the community people really helped me out understanding Pharo and answered even my most irrelevant questions.
Plus even if you just want to create your own libraries as long as you share them you still contributing enough. None will stop you from following your own design principles , Pharo developers made it even very easy to make your project to be installed with a single click directly from inside the image via Package Browser. This is actually one of the big strengths of Pharo that has made contributions so easy. On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 11:45 PM CodeDmitry <dimamakh...@gmail.com> wrote: > Contribution is something I've been thinking about for quite some time > because it's interesting how a lot of software is declared "open" but make > it not obvious what you can do to help, or at least participate, or just > take a glimpse at the code to see if something stands out. > > I am a believer that there is a way to structure a project in a way to make > it very easy for people with decent experience in broad programming > paradigms to jump into looking over your code and propose revisions or > question design decisions. > > That said, I've also been in groups where people only want to write things > once and forget it exists and can't handle any criticism and consider any > questions asked to them as a waste of time, who will only work on stuff > at last moment and won't let anybody help them. > > The factors I've noticed are: > > 1. Ease of finding the repositories which you want people to contribute to, > and tell them apart from > repositories which you don't want people to contribute to, or are > irrelevant > to the project(often a project > is broken down into multiple repositories, and the dependency chain isn't > clear). > > 2. Dependencies: If you ever took a look at a Minix Kernel, you will notice > a huge chain of headers > including headers including headers, scopes with over 7 variables in them, > and nonflat hierarchies which > look at multiple include directories, many of which are not even part of > the > project, eg Minix will look at > the system's include directory to decide things rather than figure it out > in > a standalone way. This means > that it is very hard to just take things out of context and understand them > without traversing huge > dependency chains, this really discourages contribution. > > 3. Strict coding guidelines: i've seen projects that force you to either > use > tabs, or only use spaces, or such. These are very harmful to encouraging as > many people to participate as possible; we have tools > to restructure code you are looking at automatically, but these tools are > not very easy to access on > all platforms, and need to be configured to your tastes. These tools > improve > productivity immensely but > people need to be told how to use them. > > 4. Ease of telling "where is the start" "where is the end". Many projects > are simply too hard to tell where the start/where the end is, and where the > plugins are, etc. Making it clear where the VM start point is, and > how the project is structured, how the dependency chain looks like really > helps familiarize yourself faster, > and lets people jump into contributing faster as they don't feel like they > need to learn EVERYTHING > before doing anything. > > ---- > > My argument is: > Let S be the set of all people who are aware of Pharo's existence who have > enough > programming experience to be relevant to possibly contributing. > > Let C be the set of all the people in S who have an interest in > contributing > to Pharo, or are willing to contribute to Pharo if you were to come up to > them and ask them to sit next to you and work on it with you. eg they have > the time/resources but don't feel like they go out of their way to get > started. > > Let N be the set of all the people in C who are actually contributing or > will contribute to Pharo at some point. > > There exists a way to structure the project under a philosophy which, the > closer you come to it, > the more set N decreases, that is, if the philosophy is executed perfectly, > there are no people who are > capable of contributing something relevant, who have not done so or will > never do so. > > I am not quite sure what the exhaustive philosophy is, but I suspect the > factors up front play a part in it. > > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://forum.world.st/Intro-to-Microsoft-COM-for-Smalltalkers-tp4917738p4917793.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > >
