[incepted]

> On Windows, it just works out of the box without even running an installer.

You say this as if it's a good thing, it's not. It's a bad thing on Windows. It means the software will not be able to use a lot of facilities on the Windows platform. It's also a hassle for users who need to pick up a target directory, remember it's there, create a shortcut manually, etc...

There are reasons why modern operating systems use installers

As for the article, it is incredibly dated and wrong on many fronts about how people ship software on Windows.

I'll just address one point:

> Unfortunately is not a very flexible way to package anything into a single compiled executable. It is hard to ship an update - since you have to redeploy the executable anytime your program changes.

Installing and updating executables on Windows is a solved problem. Solved. It's so easy to deploy patches and even have software self update that nobody thinks about it any more. The fact that Pharo is reinventing its own process under the cover of doing it better (which they don't, it's worse by all standards) is precisely the problem that I was referring to: Pharo (and Smalltalk people in general) still don't understand how to deploy software on modern computers.