From: Vincent Manis <vmanis@...>
Date: 2011-04-15T06:43:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for beginners (was: Re: Hello)

I've been out of the loop for the last day or so, so I've bundled up my comments rather than try to attach as replies to individual messages. 

1. The whole point of this is to have something useful for newbies. I think most of us put together the environments we each like, and this should probably continue. It's surprising how little of an IDE a beginner will actually use. For example, syntax coloring. I love it myself, but beginners often don't even notice it, or understand why the various words are in different colors. (I taught introductory computer science at the university level for a few decades, and that was what I saw in labs.) Most of the menu commands are unknown territory to most beginners. It seems to me that few beginners see what an asset a good editor is. They ask themselves (reasonably, in my opinion) `what's the least I have to know to get my program working?'. Therefore, while in general adding features isn't going to hurt a beginner, keeping the environment as simple as possible is highly desirable. 

2. I would identify four environments of immediate interest: Windows, OS X, Un*x/GNOME, and Un*x/KDE. Three of these come with quite reasonable editors: TextEdit (OS X), Gedit (GNOME), and Kedit (KDE). (You can argue for different editors on those three platforms, I'm just saying that they are reasonable.) Windows is the exception (you have to ask yourself `what kind of deranged company would ship an operating system without a decent editor?', but this is Windows we're talking about :). Notepad is an OK editor, modulo one `feature': it automatically appends ".txt" to file names. Teaching people to put quotes around their file names is not that big of a deal, I'd say. 

3. I would not care to say that *ix users are more or less sophisticated than any other users. It's certainly true that most unsophisticated users who go out to buy a computer come back with a Windows box, but unsophisticated users might be running on any system. 

4. I had a grand total of five minutes to look at the arcadia web page. It sounded somewhat interesting, and might factor well into these discussions. 

As I wrote this message, I think I'm coming up with a concrete proposal. The `Ruby for newbies' (`Rewbies'? :) page should lead to four different brief tutorials, one for each of the above operating systems/desktops, and should lead people through installing and running simple programs on each of thse systems, using the native text editor. The premium is on doing as few configuration steps as possible: Ruby programs will be run in a terminal/command prompt window, and editing is done using the system's native editor. A longer-term objective is finding an IDLE-like IDE that runs with no effort cross-platform. However, I'm inclined not to let that goal preclude us from doing useful things now. 

Comments? -- vincent