Re: Easy Euphoria a Fairy tale
- Posted by irv May 31, 2015
- 4040 views
You're right, of course. And actually, making the Eu docs 'friendlier' wouldn't help all that much, since they are - simply because of the size - intimidating.
Even David Gay's "A Beginners Guide", as annotated by Tom C. is pretty big, 200+ pages.
And they aren't geared toward 'teaching programming', anyway. You need to know the concepts already before the above documents will make much sense to you.
A newcomer to programming - or, for that matter, a newcomer to Eu (but veteran of other programming languages) just wants to do something now. IOW, to see some results.
You perhaps remember the excitement of 'writing' your first program - actually, you probably just copied some code from the web (or, if you're old enough, a book) - probably a Basic loop to print the numbers from 1 to 10.
Even someone with years of experience with a dozen different languages is going to want to try something similar. In my case, if a 1...10 loop takes 30 lines of code and a lot of strange squiggly characters to make it work, that's enough to make me look elsewhere. On the other hand, if a language has a feature that makes a common task much easier than other languages I've used, I may be impressed enough to give it a try.
Isn't that what we want: to attract newcomers to Eu, and to convince seasoned programmers to try Eu?
So I suggest a series of simple demo programs - 1 to 20 lines or so - with extensive step-by-step explanation. Anyone could contribute. One person could volunteer to format them neatly so the appearance would be uniform. Make them available here. Preferably each demo should illustrate some Eu feature that makes it stand out from the crowd.
