My initial burst of enthusiasm was dampened by the big gap between the entry-level introductions (ProfStef tutorial, the introductory MOOC) and the sheer complexity of everything the image includes. I'm not a big-time Java developer, I certainly appreciate the elegance of the language and dev environment compared to, say, Python, but that huge list of packages and their Baselines in the left pane of the system browser makes it really difficult to tell where to get started. I attended an online Smalltalk meetup recently, and one of the veteran Smalltalkers there was preferentially rebasing his code on Cuis because he felt Pharo had become too heavyweight.
I also fear that leaning so heavily on a closed, corporate platform like Discord as the community hub may lead to tears in a few years. If you're leaning into the idea that "the community is the documentation," you're at Discord's mercy for community sustainment, on top of the already hairy problem of surfacing solutions from within the depths of a long-running discussion forum. Sure, running everything off of mailing lists + IRC like older open source projects do would be a clear step backwards, but being stuck with Discord has been a mild turn-off for me.
Finally, it's worth noting that development is spearheaded by folks in France and Latin America for whom English may not be their primary language. That doesn't affect their ability to do good work! It's totally worth reflecting on how something attempting to approximate natural-language programming in English ended up forked outside the Anglosphere! But I also feel like it'd be worth having an editor take a cleanup pass at future versions of the main ebooks. I've got both the books that Alexandre Bergel published through Apress, and they're both solid, but if the first-resort resources were up to the same standard, I think perhaps fewer people would come away with an unfavorable impression. Of course, that's over and above simply keeping them up to date as development progresses - I believe Pharo by Example is still on version 9?
I also fear that leaning so heavily on a closed, corporate platform like Discord as the community hub may lead to tears in a few years. If you're leaning into the idea that "the community is the documentation," you're at Discord's mercy for community sustainment, on top of the already hairy problem of surfacing solutions from within the depths of a long-running discussion forum. Sure, running everything off of mailing lists + IRC like older open source projects do would be a clear step backwards, but being stuck with Discord has been a mild turn-off for me.
Finally, it's worth noting that development is spearheaded by folks in France and Latin America for whom English may not be their primary language. That doesn't affect their ability to do good work! It's totally worth reflecting on how something attempting to approximate natural-language programming in English ended up forked outside the Anglosphere! But I also feel like it'd be worth having an editor take a cleanup pass at future versions of the main ebooks. I've got both the books that Alexandre Bergel published through Apress, and they're both solid, but if the first-resort resources were up to the same standard, I think perhaps fewer people would come away with an unfavorable impression. Of course, that's over and above simply keeping them up to date as development progresses - I believe Pharo by Example is still on version 9?