Even after I run the image, the browser doesn't make for the best tool to learn the overview of the system. Methods are tiny and a lot of them and you must click each one in turn to see the docstring. It's not easy to know which class is in which package or why. A lot of the classes have no docstring, but are described in some the ancestor class, and there's no way to display dosctrings of a group of classes at once - instead, you have to click through them manually. Various search tools help, but it's also not immediately obvious where they are or how to use them.
The system gets infinitely more discoverable once you install Roassal, which has tons of very useful example visualizations. But it's not installed in the default image, you need to know you need it and know enough Smalltalk and Pharo to install and run it and then how to modify the examples to make them useful for your current exploration area.
Anyway, that's how it is: painful to learn. It's great if you have someone to take you through the whole thing, but that doesn't scale, while the rate of change renders non-reference-like docs (Pharo by Example, Deep into Pharo) obsolete very quickly. Putting Pharo-devs effort into actually documenting the classes and then exposing these docs in accessible HTML is something I would really love to see one day...
Just wanted to add, there's quite a lot of documentation in the form of class and method comments, which could be (a starting point for) reference docs if dumped to (even static) HTML. The fact that I can't read about the methods of Collection class in the browser, like I can do here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html or here: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/pairs.html?q=list#%28... or https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.6/Enumerable.html (or basically with any other lang) in 2019 is very wrong in my opinion :(
Even after I run the image, the browser doesn't make for the best tool to learn the overview of the system. Methods are tiny and a lot of them and you must click each one in turn to see the docstring. It's not easy to know which class is in which package or why. A lot of the classes have no docstring, but are described in some the ancestor class, and there's no way to display dosctrings of a group of classes at once - instead, you have to click through them manually. Various search tools help, but it's also not immediately obvious where they are or how to use them.
The system gets infinitely more discoverable once you install Roassal, which has tons of very useful example visualizations. But it's not installed in the default image, you need to know you need it and know enough Smalltalk and Pharo to install and run it and then how to modify the examples to make them useful for your current exploration area.
Anyway, that's how it is: painful to learn. It's great if you have someone to take you through the whole thing, but that doesn't scale, while the rate of change renders non-reference-like docs (Pharo by Example, Deep into Pharo) obsolete very quickly. Putting Pharo-devs effort into actually documenting the classes and then exposing these docs in accessible HTML is something I would really love to see one day...