Re: How you discovered Euphoria?
- Posted by Jason Gade <jaygade at yahoo.com> Nov 17, 2005
- 451 views
ChrisBurch2 wrote: > > Hi > > I thimk this brings up an interesting point. One of the selling features > of euphoria is that it is easy for beginners to pick up, but I wonder exactly > how many poeple came to euphoria from other languages, rather than just > being straight beginners, brand new to programming. > > This in turn raises another couple of points. > > 1. Euphoria can be a pig to set up and get going. Are absolute beginners > turned off by this, whereas more experienced programmers / computer users > perservere to install it, set all the paths etc. > > 2. Beginner programmers expect a GUI / IDE built in to the installation. Rob, > > how many users / beginners / sales are being lost because beginners don't have > an installation .exe, which sets up the paths, installs the help files, > installs the IDE (whichever one you decide to be the official one), > and installs a set of well documented example, console / command line, > and GUI? > > Just my musings during a quiet moment at work, but then I don't make money > by selling Euphoria. > > Chris This is a good point and I think it brings up some interesting questions. When absolute beginners start looking for programming languages, what are their goals? Back in the "Good Old Days", computers had BASIC built into ROM and it was not only a programming language, but an interface to the computer itself. Part of learning to use the computer at all was learning to write simple programs. By the time disk operating systems and GUIs became common place, most tasks that people learned programming for could be handled by application programs. I think that the simple spreadsheet is far more powerful than BASIC ever was! Anyway, the point is I don't think that many "beginners" know what programming is or why they need it. I don't think they should be discouraged, but they do need to know a bit about the computer before delving in. Now, I also see an opportunity to write a simple "programming language" that is maybe like Hypercard or something. Let the user add widgets to a screen, connect some kind of actions to those widgets, use a simple scripting language and voila! Simple interactive programming for beginners. Now I'm not talking Judith's IDE, here, but rather something that is geared specifically for beginners. j.