you see a welcome wizard when you open it.
it has pages, as the arrow show clearly (maybe this is not understood?)... and the 3rd page is literally a pointer to resources to learn pharo (including a small tutorial called ProfStef and an online MOOC).
and of course, joining our discord server (invite at: http://pharo.org/community) is the best way to get help and guidance in fast way, we have several channel dedicated to help newbies :)
Is a generic purpose language, and there are generic usages, and a lot of examples :)
But here you have a huge SaaS made with Pharo: https://yesplan.be/en, and here you have a small mobile app made also with Pharo: https://plc3000.com
[edit] technically is not a mobile app, but runs in any browser so... yes :P
there was a problem with the PhL, that took more time to update of what we thought. Now it should be working... but please take into account that 32bit versions are deprecated (unless you're working on ARM)
it doesn't yet support the whole IDE (because it has some other complications, we will solve in next release), but it supports application development with it.
weird, it loads correctly for me.
Yes, a bunch of companies (some of them very important in their fields) are backing Pharo... but Pharo is a community effort, made by hundreds of people.
I have to say this: I am the architect of Pharo (bah, the guy who has the responsibility of putting the pieces together and handle the releases). While I cannot do anything about it, I do not feel comfortable (and I know a lot if not all the members of the "core team" either) with this kind of "evangelisation". We love our little environment, and we certainly believe it has merits enough to be considered a player in the language ecosystem. We do our language with passion and conviction, but also with respect for other languages and programmers.
While the author has the right to do as he thinks is the best, please consider this is not how the team developing Pharo thinks and act.
But Pharo by Example comes with a Pharo version suitable with the book, you just hasto download it and use it. Of course, is an old Pharo version (1.1, I think), but enough to learn and jump to the newer versions.
There is an update of the book coming soon too, btw).
quite the opposite: you can think on a pharo application as your own virtual system (think docker, but at the level of the development environment). For a sysadmin installing and running an app is as easy as saying:
curl get.pharo.org | bash
./pharo Pharo.image config URL PROJECT VERSION
./pharo Pharo.image http --start 8080
then they can reproduce last line as much as they want:
Pharo (and others) can interact without many problems with any file-format VCS using "filetree" (an file based export source format).
There are many of us using it for projects more or less complex (one of them the Pharo VM: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm). So, while we can improve in that area, we are not agnostic :)
Now, you can do scripting with Pharo too, but using console to edit it is so alien for us that we cannot even understand why someone would want to drop a complete development environment (with some really nice tools), just to use a text editor...
that's because they buy development, not products.
I've worked in some big corporations who enforced Java internally, but they do not care about products they also use (best example is office tools, but I've seen many "business oriented" products developed in other languages: i.e. first versions of rational suite -yes, I'm old- were made also in smalltalk and nobody ever cared about, etc. etc. etc.)
I myself also would prefer native windows, and I time to time continue working on Mars... but is a side project nobody has actually expressed interest, so I usually spend my time in other, more required, stuff.
But... Mars was loading in Pharo 4.0, and even if very incomplete, is usable for them who want to give it a try and finish it (also people showing interest could help me to get motivation :) )