1. Re: How you discovered Euphoria?
ChrisBurch2 wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I thimk this brings up an interesting point. One of the selling features
> of euphoria is that it is easy for beginners to pick up, but I wonder exactly
> how many poeple came to euphoria from other languages, rather than just
> being straight beginners, brand new to programming.
>
> This in turn raises another couple of points.
>
> 1. Euphoria can be a pig to set up and get going. Are absolute beginners
> turned off by this, whereas more experienced programmers / computer users
> perservere to install it, set all the paths etc.
>
> 2. Beginner programmers expect a GUI / IDE built in to the installation. Rob,
>
> how many users / beginners / sales are being lost because beginners don't have
> an installation .exe, which sets up the paths, installs the help files,
> installs the IDE (whichever one you decide to be the official one),
> and installs a set of well documented example, console / command line,
> and GUI?
>
> Just my musings during a quiet moment at work, but then I don't make money
> by selling Euphoria.
>
> Chris
This is a good point and I think it brings up some interesting questions.
When absolute beginners start looking for programming languages, what are their
goals?
Back in the "Good Old Days", computers had BASIC built into ROM and it was not
only a programming language, but an interface to the computer itself. Part of
learning to use the computer at all was learning to write simple programs.
By the time disk operating systems and GUIs became common place, most tasks that
people learned programming for could be handled by application programs. I think
that the simple spreadsheet is far more powerful than BASIC ever was!
Anyway, the point is I don't think that many "beginners" know what programming
is or why they need it. I don't think they should be discouraged, but they do
need to know a bit about the computer before delving in.
Now, I also see an opportunity to write a simple "programming language" that is
maybe like Hypercard or something. Let the user add widgets to a screen, connect
some kind of actions to those widgets, use a simple scripting language and voila!
Simple interactive programming for beginners.
Now I'm not talking Judith's IDE, here, but rather something that is geared
specifically for beginners.
j.
