Re: Rosetta Code mic drop
- Posted by petelomax Jan 21, 2022
- 3106 views
I sent a email to LWN.net ("Linux Weekly News") about a Phix article.
If we can come up with an article outline for about 1500 words, they might be interested. This would be something like a piece for a technical journal.
My idea is to use your Rosetta achievement as a hook to describe Phix.
I can edit what you come up with, or we can joint author.
This is a chance for all Euphoria/Phix fans to contribute their ideas...
Yes!!! - I was thinking/hoping along similar lines.
Post#1 is 246 words, so they want six times that.
There is plenty of text at http://phix.x10.mx/docs/html/p2js.htm though not at all suitable as-is - in particular aimed too much at Phix users, anything like "enum type" is just going to be completely meaningless to their target audience.
Actually, do you know of any existing articles I should read, if only to try and gauge what that target audience actually is?
[EDIT] I found a few: Julia concurrency, Python arg defaults, Go and Ruby for loops.
Off the top of my head, some possible topics/paragraphs:
- Ease (or lack thereof) of installation and use. I'm almost certainly too biased to pen that. The short version is install Phix, run pwa\p2js.exw, "Choose File"(==Ctrl O), pick from (say) demo/rosetta (not beginning "without js"), and press F5.
- Technical challenges. The biggest one being desktop/Phix's copy-on-write-semantics vs JavaScript's pass-by-sharing-semantics, which has been solved by "with javascript_semantics". I suspect that 0 vs 1-based indexes should either be omitted or a minor throw-away line, likewise JavaScript not having characters (esp tab) simply isn't worth shouting about and certainly not going to get anyone excited. It kills me to say the latter might also be true of the drop-in mpfr.js replacement, and indeed most and maybe all of the low-level hard effort I've put in behind the scenes. Admitting that pGUI.js/css is far from complete and needs any help it can get is a bit of a must, as of course are several (carefully) selected links from https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Phix/online.
- Development process is worth a quick mention, specifically develop and debug on desktop/Phix first, before trying to run anything in a browser.
- Case studies - does anything on rosettacode strike anyone as being suitable, or at the very least sufficiently interesting?
- Wishlist - maybe finish with some optimistric pipe dreams and/or hopes for the future.
The key point is to omit anything which is likely to be meaningless to a wider audience.
The key question at every stage is what is going to catch their eye and keep them engaged?
