Hi, I'm having yet another go to get to grips with Pharo.
My project is for home automation. It seems in principle a great match since object inside Smalltalk are obviously a great match for physical objects being controlled. I started at the Pharo Wiki on Github "Setting up a new project". I'm a career programmer but I'm nearly 60 and sadly I can't absorb information like I used to be able to, and I'm just finding Pharo so overwhelming - I feel like a maintenance programmer trying to find a way into a million lines of code when you don't understand the principles of organisation and the conventions of the developers. Is there no way to have some sort of "progressive revelation" of the insides of Pharo? Just documentation on most classes, examples of how to use the class, without the implementation being exposed initially? The stuff I need to look into for my project is mixed in with 1000s of classes that I (hopefully) can ignore for now - but there seems to be no way to hide away all the irrelevant stuff. Traditionally if I was trying to get to grips with a large unfamiliar code base I would use grep to search, skim through source files getting a sense of it. With the browser in Pharo I feel like I'm looking through a keyhole. No doubt this is just unfamiliarity and I just need to learn the tools better. Please read this as a request for help as to how to get a finger hold and how to shake this feeling of drinking from the firehose? It's not intended as a complaint. My first task is to write an MQTTClient. MQTT is a messaging protocol. MQTT has "clients" - who subscribe for "topics" and receive matching messages, and which can publish to topics. And there are brokers which distribute published messages to subscribing clients. I only need to implement a client. The protocol is binary, not text. It runs over TCP. Here's a description of the messaging SInce I envision objects inside Pharo that model the real external objects then I will need some sort of background process running the connection to the mqtt broker, and each object would receive and send MQTT messages via that process. So to tackle this I need to understand: 1. How to implement a TCP client (subclass ProtocolClient? Or do I need to work at a lower level with SocketStream?) 2. Packing and unpacking binary data, working with bits. 3. How to talk to and from a background process. Any and all suggestions and help to get going would be welcome. I do understand the principles of Smalltalk and can read code OK. Thanks, Steve
