Yeah I did the same the other night - same experience. It’s like releasing a modern game and expecting players to read the manual to learn how to play. We know how to effectively teach users to use - there’s an entire field of study devoted to usability and accessibility.
I don’t have time to waste on something that ignores the last 40 years of progress in that realm.
What's to say they have "something" to waste on making a foolproof way of getting started for people who aren't even curious?
They're not selling a product here, they're releasing software they've written in their own spare time. If you can't spare 30 minutes for running through the tutorial, why should they spend more time catering to you rather than spending it on more interesting problems?
Sure - but it's also being touted as something special that's worth paying attention to for programmers.
Like - when I first learned about Smalltalk, and looked at the syntax, I wanted to try it out right away! Playing with that realm of object oriented programming looks like fun!
But jumping through hoops to make it work is not fun - the process of just setting things up and trying to pick through the whole alien interface completely evaporated my enthusiasm. It quickly became clear to me that you can't 'just sit down and write code' the way you can with basically any other modern language I've worked with. You have to do a bunch of other stuff first. And I don't want to do that.
You can open a web browser, hit F12, and immediately start writing javascript and running it. You can use notepad to make an .htm file, drag it into the browser, and boom it's a web page. If you're on a device that makes task switching awkward, you can navigate straight to codepen.io, no sweat. You know what I mean? Immediacy is an essential quality, for me - obscurity, esotericism, inaccessibility and poor usability are all banes of my existence.
It's like sure, I can do anything I put my mind to - I can spend the next hour, the next day, the next week, month, year, decade, learning to do this thing... but that's time I'll never get back, and that's time I could be spending more efficiently stepping into something else, equally exciting and different and new and interesting, with significantly less barrier to entry.
If you care about your work, and your goal is to expose others to it, then you need to put the work into making it accessible. That's been my experience.
> why should they spend more time catering to you rather than spending it on more interesting problems?
Of course, if you're content with your community stagnating and nobody ever using that software, then there's really no reason to put that effort in.
I remember similar arguments about Linux installers. Why should they cater to people who don't even know fdisk? We have kernel to work on, UX of an installer - with obvious, immediate impact on adoption and getting new users - is boring in comparison. Having installed Fedora last week I can attest that this line of thinking, fortunately, went away in Linux as far as installers go. The chances of it going away in the Pharo community, however, are slim at best.
I don’t have time to waste on something that ignores the last 40 years of progress in that realm.