Dear all, I'm a Pharo novice, in the middle of a self paced Pharo MOOC, with years of experence going from Turbo C on DOS over Visual Studio and Eclipse to Visual Studio Code in last years. Besides, I'm a professor and a researcher of IT adoption, so here's my two cents contributing to this very interesting debate.
Developers are users, and (potential) users decide upon four things: - expected performance of a tool (what a tool can do and what it represents) - user effort expectancy while learning (i.e. learning curve) and using the tool - social influence (i.e. what other developers are doing, saying and collaborating with) - facilitating conditions (support, i.e. strong & helping community, tutorials, user manuals) We can discuss and rant about which language or a tool is better of worse in a caffee (like complaining about the weather or our bosses), however for a progress and good decisions it is necessary that we forget about our personal feelings and preferences. There is no doubt, Pharo delivers many new, stunningly innovative and revolutionary approaches, and all the efforts of its developers are worthwhile and greatly appreciated. When there is a question about editing the code, we can look for the philosophies of other editors/IDEs. For instance, authors of VSCode are saying <https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/whyvscode> "First and foremost, it is an editor that gets out of your way. The delightfully frictionless edit-build-debug cycle means less time fiddling with your environment, and more time executing on your ideas." How far away from this idea is Pharo, if we compare both worlds? Pharo is an OS, IDE, editor and a language - but can we make it to get out of our way in the sense of developers' effort expectancy? Maybe we don't need anything special to go into this direction. Just a couple more of keystrokes to directly support edit-build-debug and TDD development cycles and some work on the "console like feeling" when interacting in Pharo. The dark theme is great, btw :-) I think that a wish to directly edit the .st files comes from the fact that other editors and IDEs are "linear" by design - we edit flat files with them, and these files (modules) are longer than a typical method in Pharo. A developer focuses on the method/function at hand, however she just has to scroll up and down to reach other methods/functions within a module, while in Pharo you typically grab your mouse and browse with the class browser. Can a couple of keystrokes be a solution? So, my proposal is that we forget about our personal feelings and preferences, and think outside the box - which is a Pharo domain, after all! -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
