Hi Richard, I think this revelation points to another important impact that your competition can have on spreading the use of Pharo in the community -- beyond the obvious one of raising awareness.
You now have a golden opportunity to collect valuable inputs from a large group who are getting starting with Pharo. They have a unique perspective regarding the language & IDE learning process. What helped them learn? What hindered them? What resources were useful, and why? How did their impressions of Pharo change from when they were first introduced to the language/IDE? What suggestions do they have for other newcomers? Your one group found the class library intractable... That's probably not surprising; I tell those I'm introducing to Smalltalk that the hardest part of learning any OOP language is learning the foundation class library (as this is what you will build your code on top of). And of course it's intimidating. I try to reassure them by pointing out that the developers of Smalltalk realized this and have been contributing and improving tools specifically designed to help programmers find the classes & methods they need. Which then leads to demonstrations of those tools. Written documentation should help, of course, but what kind? The class comment type of documentation (much like Linux man pages) works well as a reference and clarification for those already somewhat familiar with the classes and their uses. Does it work well for those unfamiliar with the language? Are they sufficiently easy to find? The GNU Smalltalk reference addresses this by grouping them together into one document. Perhaps some automation to extract these from Pharo and group/title them would be a way to start? (Better: Have an application that can "go both directions" so that edits to either set of docs can be used to update the other. Think how important a tool that would be!) How to improve on class comments as a means of learning (besides just writing more class comments)? The Pharo booklet series are a *big* help, as are tutorials such as the MOOC. Personally, I like to study examples of well-written code to learn techniques, style, and structure. Pharo complicates this, however, due to the fact that the language and IDE are intertwined. It's also complicated because you don't have the typical "synoptic view" that most text-based languages provide. And there's more to learn than just language syntax (which is "the easy part"); my point about how to find resources is an example of this. In a way, we need Pharo booklets on subjects such as "How to use the Pharo toolset to find classes you need", "Techniques for structuring & expressing common operations in Pharo", etc. I'm thinking that your groups could help with identifying where the cognitive stumbling blocks are and inspire thinking about how best to address them. After all, your contestants currently are experts on the subject of learning Pharo and applying it to solve a real-world problem for the first time. They're acutely aware of what helped & what hindered. We need to target the problem areas to make things easier for those coming after. I don't think it's as simple as "write more documentation"; the question is "which kind of documentation" and "what types of learning tools" will help most? I'm very curious to see the "robot mind" code, so I hope some of them get published. (That will serve another purpose, by indicating how those who are new to Smalltalk reason with its syntax and semantics for the first time.) It will be helpful to see the code for the "Organizer", too. Not so that we can duplicate it, but to help us with learning how to architect applications like these. The game itself can be a learning tool for more than just the students in the competition! Thanks, -t -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
