Re: Is Euphoria ever going to be newbie-friendly?
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Jun 30, 2015
- 3625 views
are newbies ever going to be the target audience of the language developement efforts (or at least of some significant part of it)?
Without some significant work, probably not. It takes quite a bit of effort for a new programmer to learn a language, and why would a programmer experienced in another language want to change.
The 'newbie experience' will be based on a direct comparison with other languages - ie how much effort does it take to get a 'hello world' with w32engine / eugtk etc, versus a language with everything installed, and (I realise how hated this term is amongst the more experienced programmers here) plonkability.
While the language itself may be elegant, if you want to attract newbies, you have to grab a potential new audience with the attention span of half an iTunes song (I generalise), and make them go "ooooh"
Next is the effort required by the community to get to that stage. We all have lives, we are a small community with a finite / limited amount of time to do this, with a splintering of gui toolkits that, while each kit in itself is an impressive piece of work, does nothing (in my opinion) to help focus a newbie on what matters to them - creating an app. And this is a chicken and egg situation, until there are more people with more time, their will be fewer newbies attracted, to create more people with more time.
So what to do? The community has to get together, to focus on the 'newbie ooh factor', and put aside the more advanced toolkits until the newbie wants to advance. Almost a Euphoria simple, and an Eu++ (I hate those too by the way).
Now, I don't have the time right now to do this, but perhaps a community project with a defined set of goals, aims and methods to get there could be achieved. Step one on this road would be to start a forum with folders - this looks more familiar to most newbies, rather than this list format (I don't dislike it, it's just not as familiar as a forum). Eu can do it - show the code! We could then create a folder for Eu simple, and within that create a Euphoria with the oooh factor (that's oooh, not OO by the way).
Anyway, babbling done.
Cheers
Chris
