OpenEuphoria

Re: Newbies - a proposal

• Posted by "Juergen Luethje" <j.lue at gmx.de> Sep 22, 2004
• 439 views

Irv Mullins wrote:

> Kat wrote:
>
>> Lemme try again.... if i don't see the howto of a language, an example of how
>> the words are used, and what the language words are, i won't bother to
>> download the language. Presto, no setup. I haveto be already interested in a
>> language to download a language with no online help, with all the docs in the
>> download/install package.
>
> I agree 100%. The most important thing to me, and I suppose to many people
> who may be looking for a language, is to see what kinds of things can be
> done with the language, and what the code to do those things looks like.
> (Something more complex than "hello world", since that looks the same in
> many languages.)
>
> If what I see is uncluttered and makes sense, only then will I bother to
> download and install it (and work thru the setup hassles).
>
> Having some simple but real programs on view would also help people who
> have unreaslistic expectataions, such as what "easy" means when referring
> to programming.

I agree, too.
When I was new to Euphoria, I appreciated the demo programs very much.
They don't "only" show the Euphoria semantics and syntax, but also
interesting algorithms.

Demo programs that ship with other programming languages which I've seen,
often were written halfheartedly. The Euphoria demo programs IMHO are
written very clean, and many do actually useful things, and show
interesting algorithms.

For instance, I had dealt with some flavors of BASIC for some years.
Beside other books, I also read the entire famous book about BASIC by
Ethan Winer (704 pages in the German edition), and I literally *never*
read something about hashing in any of the books.
I can't exactly remember when I read about hash tables for the first
time. It must have been in a book about Pascal, or in Robert Sedgewick's
"Algorithms" (the sample programs are written in Pascal). So at first, I
thought that hash tables were something specific of Pascal. :o)

Although Euphoria is as simple as (or maybe simpler than) BASIC, RDS
even ships a hash demo program, where I easily could understand the
principle of hashing, and which also is useful.

To make a long story short:
RDS has done a great job with the Eu demo programs. Maybe -- to
supplement the documentation, which is already completely online --
they want to put some of these programs on their website, in order to
quicken the appetite of newbies.

Of course, writing instructive and/or addictive demo programs, is a
challenge for all our new tutorial authors, too. 

Regards,
   Juergen

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