Authors of open source projects don’t owe you anything. If you want something changed, do it yourself, or ask them. You could even go so far as to offer to pay them. If you aren’t up for any of that, well… not sure what to tell you!
> If you want something changed, do it yourself, or ask them.
I did ask. See my other comment[1]. The only thing I got out of asking was name calling, dismissive and rude remarks, and the immortal "do it yourself". Before the package manager thing, I did the same - years earlier - asking on the mailing list how to bind keys to commands. What I got out of this was name calling, dismissive and rude remarks, and the immortal "learn to use the mouse already!"
Sure, nobody owes anything to anybody, not even not being toxic and abrasive. But I also don't owe the toxic and abrasive community anything - certainly not avoiding criticizing it. Right?
Oh, and I'm certainly NOT going to offer money to people who swear at me. Yeah, it's not a product, not developed by a company, all true - but I still refuse to be called an idiot and keep quiet about it.
So, to be clear, you are saying that it is indecent that there isn't a notice on their page saying "this project is not for lazy people. Please go away if you are too lazy to find the tutorial"? I really don't think that is more decent
Well, I do. As it is right now, the front page is misleading. They say there that Pharo is made by "an incredible community" (oh, the humility!). Someone might read it and think that there's a helpful, friendly community that they could (politely) ask for support without fear of being called "entitled" and without a barrage of "you just don't understand how glorious our way of doing things is!" following. Well, they would be wrong.
As in the reply to a sibling comment, yeah, nobody owes anything to anybody. But, you know, we do things we don't owe to anybody every day. I don't owe my neighbor saying "hi" when I meet them, but I still do. I don't owe my guests anything, but I still offer them a seat. Pharo community tries to do it both ways: they appear to want new users, but when you come closer you'll see what they actually want is new fanatics. Screw that. They don't owe me anything, but neither do I owe them keeping quiet about what I've been through.
Smalltalk is beautiful. And, Smalltalk is not just Pharo. There are other communities, and there are much better Smalltalks out there. Cincom (no affiliation) Visual Works is so much better an implementation that it's scary. Pharo could be like that, if only the "incredible community" stopped killing all semblance of stability with constant rewrites of everything, stopped treating users like unwanted baggage, stopped insulting people whose use cases don't completely fit the community's idea of what's good and bad.
Pharo community is a museum that preserved the culture of Smug Lisp Weenies intact. Good for them. Meanwhile, Pharo being advertised as "the most actively developed and most advanced Smalltalk" - which means that it's first, and very often last Smalltalk tried out by people - hurts the wider community and hurts Smalltalk adoption. They don't care. Is this a decent behavior? I think it's irresponsible, at the very least.
Look, I spent 5 years trying to work with Pharo. Not a few minutes. Yeah, I don't care about Pharo anymore. At all. That's because of what I've been through with it and its community. So please stop telling me I'm lazy, entitled, or that I "don't care after a few minutes". I've been giving Pharo chances for years - it just never got any better.
I'm mentioning Cincom (no affiliation) Visual Works over and over again. If you read it carefully, you'd see that I'm not entirely OK with the restrictive personal license, the lack of any cryptography-related stuff (incl. HTTPS), and the closed source VM. I'd prefer a Smalltalk without these restrictions. I still use VW and not Pharo - because the gap in quality of the software is so incredibly wide that it dwarfs other considerations. VW looks like it's made by professionals (well paid at that). Pharo looks anything but, yet (politely, out of concern and genuine interest) pointing it out gets you hate and verbal violence from the community.
I want an open source Smalltalk implementation. I want more people to like Smalltalk. I want more people to use Smalltalk. Pharo could be helpful with these, but it's not. Instead of a gateway into Smalltalk ecosystem, Pharo is an impenetrable wall to new users. And the community doesn't care. There are some people that do care. See Glamorous Toolkit. See Cuis.
I wrote a few small pet projects in Pharo, back in 2012. They kept getting broken release after release. And at some point, the default download with official releases stopped working altogether. And never worked again. There's a ticket from 2021 (created years after it stopped working for me) describing the problem: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/9729 This is a regression brought about due to another rewrite of something. Still not fixed. You know, I could fix myself and contribute the fix - I have the skills and could potentially find the time. But Pharo and its community burned so many bridges for me that this is not going to happen.
Call me petty all you want, but the kinds of people running Pharo are just not worth being helped.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points without swipes and attacks, no matter how bad a programming community is or you feel it is.
Please review the rules and stick to them from now on.
p.s. I appreciate your love for Smalltalk but if you express it using swipes and attacks, you're actually discrediting it to less knowledgeable readers (i.e. most of us). It's not in your interest to turn people off of something you love, so you should follow the rules out of self-interest too.
I didn't, but isn't this for educational use only (I'm guessing, I can't access the archive of the list)? Cincom seems to offer separate license for students and teachers, I'm unfortunately unaffiliated with any educational institution :(
But I did try to get commercial license, once. I had a project and a client for it, and a seemingly ideal use case. However, I wasn't able to sell the client the kind of licensing scheme Cincom wanted (they weren't unreasonable, just not what the client was willing to have). I ultimately abandoned the idea. Still, even knowing that I'm just a solo developer that's not going to earn them much, my contact with an account from Cincom was very pleasant and helpful. I saw the changelog for the next version of VW - there was a lot of really nice stuff there! Welcome fixes, improvements in many important packages, new functionalities - the product is evidently alive and getting better, but there was one thing missing. There were No. Breaking. Changes. I could reasonably expect my app to work if I built with 8.x version and later upgraded to 9.x. Can you imagine this?
Cincom is, of course, a company targeting big corporations - a for-profit organization, and the most important part of VW is closed source. If Cincom dies, VW will probably also die, along with my projects. It's a risk, and it's not ideal. The fact that the PUL version is 6 years old at this point also isn't nice. And, above all, I don't wear suits and neckties. So, I'd really prefer fully open source Smalltalk (the only reasonable alternative, Smalltalk/X, also has the compiler distributed only as a binary blob) Unfortunately, Pharo simply cannot be that Smalltalk for me.
To the dead sibling commenter: sure, I don't event want anybody to care. I'm writing all this for my own satisfaction, so please, just do your job of not caring properly and ignore it all.
I'm not going to ban you right now because I didn't see other cases of this in your recent history, but please fix this going forward so we don't have to.
I'd say: to show that its authors have a sense of decency, at least. But let's not assassinate the lads any more than this.