There's no excuse for not having any examples of a programming language on that programming language's home page. Here are some languages that do it right:
There is an image showing many IDE windows, one of which does actually show code you would find if you already knew what the code you were looking for looked like. You could still not copy and paste it.
Then there is a textual example consisting of two lines of Posix shell, embedded in which is indeed a tiny Pharo program in a string.
The parent's point mostly stands.
(Oh, and there is a frickin' popup for a frickin' email newsletter hiding the content.)
More like a distinct Smalltalk language implementation. For decades, different Smalltalk language implementations have introduced novel things while still being recognizably implementations of Smalltalk.
I haven't been able to find a clear statement of language differences between Pharo and other Smalltalks. The closest thing I've come across is this statement of intent:
"We want to stress the fact that Pharo will certainly derive from ANSI and other Smalltalks. We will not change for the sake of change. What we want to say is that if there is something that can be improved but does not conform the ANSI Smalltalk, we will do it anyway."
I came to Pharo after the fork from Squeak. What I have picked up is that prior to the fork, there was significant tension between those that wanted to maintain backward compatibility and those that wanted to move the language forward. The latter group forked Pharo and that statement was Pharo seems to have be a response to their previous repression. In practice it hasn't yet diverged greatly.
1. Where would you copy/paste it anyway? In a Pharo image of course,
2. Image that you can download (30Mb) and test easily. The installation consists in unzipping the damn thing, that's all you need to run Pharo right away. If you don't like it, you delete the folder. That's the un-install procedure.
3. If you actually do test it for yourself, you'll find plenty of examples in the image itself, ready to copy/paste... OR NOT! Because actually, most of the times you don't even have to copy/paste; you can just select, right click and execute those examples.
The article might be a little too dithyrambic, but your criticism on this particular point shows more your own laziness than anything. Where is the adventurous programmer that bravely goes off the beaten tracks in order to discover new exciting things?
> If you actually do test it for yourself, you'll find plenty of examples in the image itself, ready to copy/paste
Over the last 15 years or so, I have regularly played around with Squeak and Pharo, and I have not found this to be the case. I mean, yes, there is code, but that's like saying "Oh, you wanna learn C? Here is the Linux source code."
Maybe I just didn't manage to find these great examples because the Pharo community's approach is "it's there, but I won't tell you where exactly; if you can't find it yourself, you are lazy/dumb/not a real programmer".
There's no excuse for not having any examples of a programming language on that programming language's home page. Here are some languages that do it right:
https://ceylon-lang.org/
https://www.dartlang.org/
https://golang.org/
https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/
Notice there at least one example (often executable!) on the home page of each site.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised how well all those sites do. Most smaller programming languages get this bit horribly wrong.