From: Keith Fahlgren <keith@...>
Date: 2006-06-12T21:14:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers?

On Sunday 11 June 2006 7:33 pm, Timothy Hunter wrote:
> > For student just starting to learn a language, a good IDE would
> > help greatly.
> >
>
> All right, I'm listening. How would an IDE help?

Well, if you're learning to program in Scheme and hear everyone say "Ew, 
I can _never_ figure out those damn parens,"[1] you can give them a 
real IDE so that they essentially never have to worry about the parens 
again (see DrScheme or vim with proper syntax highlighting and %), nor 
do they need to learn how to use a more advanced editor.

Now, if you're learning programming in Ruby, an IDE may not be as 
important, but it's probably useful to remove as many barriers to entry 
as possible--you want the kids to be learning the language, not :wq or 
CTRL-X CTRL-C.

HTH,
Keith

[1]
On Sunday 11 June 2006 1:54 pm, Nicholas Evans wrote:
> That said, I saw people getting incredibly confused by the idea of
> matching the curly braces up. 

On Monday 19 September 2005 12:32 am, Kev Jackson wrote:
>     - I think from your list it covers 1,2 and 3 (but only in my
> opinion) Cons
>     - notoriously alternative
>     - wierd keywords (car?)
>     - braces everywhere!
>     - not so easy to learn (not 4 in your list)

On Saturday, 26 Mar 2005 07:44am, Csaba Henk wrote:
> So the point is that you can get "lisp powa" in a modern scripting
> language as well without burying yourself under tons of parens and
> whew-how-the-heck-should-I-name-this-one like function names. 


.....