In the past when hovering the package list, we could see the package mini description and it would be good to resurrect it.
Now stephen I suggest you try Pharo and see because many times when I reopened VW it looks like my fingers were cut. Because I could not go super fast navigation. Pharo is far from perfect but this is what we have and we take care of it. Now if you give us some thousands of Euros you will not recognise it :). So learn and have fun and you can improve Pharo with us. S. > Hi Stefen, > > Welcome to Pharo :-) > > Here are 2 tips that whould help you find your way : > - Spotter (open it with Shift+Enter). It searches the whole image for names > (classes, methods...) that include the given substring > - Finder (Menu Tools) : Allows various kinds of searches. Searching with > examples does allow finding a message that provides a given outcome given a > receiver, and parameters. > > Please note that the image does include only a small subset of what you can > do with Pharo. There's much more out there. One way to discover cool stuff, > is to visit this catalog: > https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/awesome-pharo > <https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/awesome-pharo> > > Cheers, > Noury > >> On 30 Apr 2020, at 21:00, step...@heaveneverywhere.com >> <mailto:step...@heaveneverywhere.com> wrote: >> >> >> Hello friends, >> >> I’m getting started with Pharo after decades using VisualWorks and Squeak; >> it’s pretty wonderful what you all have assembled! >> >> My question is related to what we used to teach as the first law of software >> reuse: “You can’t reuse it if you can’t find it,” and the related software >> engineering "principle of least astonishment." >> >> When I fire up Pharo, the system browser presents me with a list of several >> hundred categories (from AST to Zodiac) in a system with over 8000 classes. >> The system categorization makes no sense since I don’t know the naming >> conventions and so many packages have cute but quite non-descriptive names >> (Zinc? Metacello? Calypso?). >> >> In Smalltalk-80, the class category names were organized as a 2-level >> hierarchy where the top-level were items such as Magnitudes, Collections, >> Streams, Graphics, Text, System, Tools, Files, etc. This made it easy to >> find (e.g.,) the browser source code by looking in the Tools package for the >> class category Tools-Browser. Even packages with cute names (like my own >> “Siren”), were categorized for ease of finding; e.g., the Siren classes were >> in class categories like Music-Events and Music-Magnitudes. >> >> Parsing the class category names on the first instance of $- made it >> possible to build 6-paned Browsers (called package pane browser in Squeak). >> (We acknowledged that this violates the “zero/one/infinity" rule.) Is >> something like this available for Pharo? I looked through the Calypso >> browser code and it’s so over-engineered (IMHO) that it’d take me several >> days to figure out how to implement this (it was about 1.5 pages of code in >> Smalltalk-80). >> >> If Pharo had a browser that scaled better and a >> reorganization/simplification of the class categories to use names that were >> more self-explanatory, it would be *much* easier for new users (in fact, for >> all users) to find their way around. >> >> I apologize for the stepping on toes... >> >> Stephen Pope >> >> >> -- >> >> Stephen Travis Pope Santa Barbara, California, USA >> <pastedGraphic.tiff> http://HeavenEverywhere.com >> <http://heaveneverywhere.com/> http://FASTLabInc.com >> <http://fastlabinc.com/> >> https://vimeo.com/user19434036/videos >> <https://vimeo.com/user19434036/videos> >> http://heaveneverywhere.com/Reflections >> <http://heaveneverywhere.com/Reflections> >> >> -- >> >> >> >
