Re: Newbies - a proposal
> Subject: Re: Newbies - a proposal
>
>
> posted by: Chris Burch <chriscrylex at aol.com>
>
> Hi
>
> See what I mean about floods of great suggestions!
>
> I have adjusted the website to change Noobs to newbies (which is the correct
> plural form of newby (I think) ) - meant entirely tongue in cheek.
>
> I've added the links to tutorials at the bottom -any other suggestions
> gratefully accepted.
>
> I did think about the order of getting the program working, includes etc,
> and I felt it was important that the new arrival be able to get the demo
> programs working with the minimum of setting up, and to see that it was
> actually a programming language, as quickly as possible. Includes, downloading
> other files etc will come later. I used how I did it as a basis. Includes
> came later.
>
> In the meantime, may I suggest that we direct all newbies to the below sites,
> as they may appear on the list. And if you want to hand hold, check out
> Uboard.
>
> http://members.aol.com/chriscrylex/euphoria.htm
> http://uboard.proboards32.com/
>
> Chris
I do agree with this approach. Only experienced computer users are patient
enough to help an installation process, because they know a few tricks and are
not considering a computer as an alien thing. So, they must get something
going fast, just to be convinced that they may use it some day.
However, I think we are mixing together two categories that don't have the
same background knowledge and needs. As they partially overlap, there are 4
categories actually.
Some newcomers had some kind of experience with programming in a very broad
sense. They can understand what is an execution flow, what is a variable, a
routine etc. They roughly know how to translate simple tasks into i/o
statements, variables and expressions. It's just that they don't know the
specifics of Eu. They may or may not have some knowledge, or at least short
experience, of another language, say basic or C(++).
On the other hand, you have people that have trouble translating the problem
they want to solve into an algorithm, because they never got the feeling for
this sort of translation. They may or may not have some experience of another
programming language, say basic or C(++). They possibly know how to perform
some previously taught tasks in that language; they know the recipes well at
best, but hardly any cooking.
Thr two main categories were presented with a deliberately close wording, to
emphasize that the subcategories inside the two main groups are the same. I'd
see newbies as lying inside a large square, the four categories dividing it in
four parts that can be grouped by two in two different ways. There are newbies
in all four smaller squares.
Newbies that have no feeling about how to transform a real-life problem into
some kind of pseudocode need to be informed about how to go about it.
"Jubilation", or the first chapters of B. Aitken's "Euphoric mysteries", do
brush the topic, probably not deep enough to help those who need it.
Such a manual (yes, I think that could be a separate tutorial) would rely on
the demo code supplied with the installation kit, but has to prepare the
reader to be able to inspect the code and start understanding it.
An effort to organize, and kind of loosely standardize, teaching Eu to newbies
must take care of this and cater for the various needs, without explicitly
separating the newbies. We just let them know there are various things to
learn, some particular to Eu, some at the heart of the very idea of
programming, and they decide what they need, asking for advice as freely as
possible.
Otherwise, I'm afaraid we may lose some of them by the roadside, because they
thought they could program without understanding what programming in any
language is. And they are those for whom the (in)famous "simple design" of Eu
is most helpful.
CChris
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
