1. User Friendly Euphoria [was Re: More tutorials.]
Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
>
> Was the language manual not sufficient? I would be interested in your opinion
> as you are going through the process of learning it for the first time. In
> addition,
> what would you find to be the ideal tutorial? What would it do? I was thinking
> at first starting from scratch and building an application of a little value,
> but even at that there are so many paths an application could take... Text
> console?
> Web based? GUI? Command line utility?
I found section the entire section 2 very useful in learning what Euphoria was
about in a few hours, but it is hard to be objective about it because I already
knew C, C++, and Perl.
So I can only speak from the perspective of someone coming from other
languages... as an example I had to crash learn Python (having looking at it
previously and thought WTF??) in order to get into Blender. For that the minimum
documentation I found useful was the language definition and library references.
I still have to refer to them every few days or so.
I think maybe the biggest barrier to getting into Euphoria is the lack of a
standard GUI with online context-sensitive help. Judith's IDE is fantastic and I
probably wouldn't have got in to Windows programming at all without it, but of
course it is Windows specific.
Given that (at a guess) 95% of casual users interested in trying out Euphoria
will be on Windows I would suggest including a bound version of that IDE and
distributing win32lib and sample GUI programs with the official install (given
respective author's approvals of course), but I do also appreciate your stated
concerns about maintenance of the code base for the official distribution.
That is where some sort of package manager would be invaluable (and is the
"industry standard" way of doing things now) whereby the individual authors could
have more autonomy in maintaining their own code and have the package management
inform the user about updates.
That said, I'd say go ahead with version 4 and put something like that on the
roadmap for v5 or v6 because a package manager would take quite a lot of
reorganisation but shouldn't break anything in the language itself.
Sorry, just realised this wasn't about tutorials at all... I tend not to use
them to learn with, I tend to look at them when something I am already doing has
gone wrong and I can see a particular tutorial deals with something I am doing.
Gary
