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 Cheers, Noury > On 30 Apr 2020, at 21:00, 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> > > -- > > >
