From: Chris Pine <glyconis@...>
Date: 2005-04-14T06:51:57+09:00
Subject: Re: On motivating a Ruby nubie

On 4/13/05, Sy <sy1235@gmail.com> wrote:
> You're already high on my reading list.  =)

Oh, good!


> The problem is when my ideas are a
> LOT bigger than I could possibly  begin working on.  Right now, my
> problem is with taking a huge and motivating idea and breaking it
> into sensible chunks.. 

This is *extremely* challenging.  Actually, this is ending up being
the hardest part of my book (which is, you know, about learning to
program... I'm a one-trick pony, what can I say :).

On the one hand, larger projects are more motivating and fun, but are
way too hard.

On the other hand, little toy programs are easy enough to be doable,
but are not terribly motivating.

On some other third mutant hand, breaking down a large program into
smaller tasks leads to a bunch of *totally* unmotivating programs,
like "convert this array of single-element hashes into arrays of
2-element arrays" or something.  Who wants to do that??

UNLESS (I am fervently hoping) you happen to know that your weird
conversion program is in fact an integral part of a webserver/blog
program you have been told you are writing.  You don't know which
part, but you've been told that at some point near the end of the
book, all of the pieces will come together and *poof*!  A big, cool
program.

(My currently problem:  being told to write the parts is one thing. 
Figuring out what parts need to be written is something else
*entirely*.  How do you teach this sort of design, or is this even in
the scope of a beginner's book on programming?)

Chris