OpenEuphoria

RE: Newbies - a proposal

• Posted by Brian Broker <bkb at cnw.com> Sep 21, 2004
• 414 views

Chris Burch wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> Just thinking about the Lobelia Overhill thread, and I came up with an 
> idea.
> 
> When newbies join the list they are often overwhelmed by well meaning 
> floods
> of suggestions, and some comments that regular users of the board will
> appreciate the meaning of, but which may be taken the wrong way the 
> newbie.
> 
> I would like to suggest a system of personal mentoring / tutoring while
> someone takes their first steps with programming and euphoria.
> 
> Lets keep it simple.
> 
<snip>

FWIW, I did actually IM Lobelia last week to help but it soon became 
apparent that she really had no experience and that made it difficult 
for even me to help.  I had to start with explaining environment 
variables and that adding EUINC, to her autoexec.bat was not going to 
mess up her system.  I pointed out my CHM version of the docs (for easy 
reference searching).  I pointed out ABGTE.  Even helped her with 
setting up Win32Lib and the IDE (which was probably too much to take in 
for one session).  Spent about an hour helping but eventually had to 
leave it up to her to figure out the rest.

In the end, I still think this list is the best source of help 
(gardening comments aside).  It's really up to the newbie to make an 
effort to learn.  It also didn't help that she had set a very high bar 
for herself in what she wanted to accomplish.  I told her that she 
needed to start *much* smaller before she got to the point of achieving 
her goal (otherwise she would get discouraged very quickly, as she did). 
 Problem was, somebody (not on this list) told her "just write your own 
program... *it's easy*".  I let her know that she should just tell those 
folks to "cram it", so to speak...

-- Brian