[REBOL] Re: Development rebol scripts on Linux
From: carl:cybercraft at: 17-Nov-2007 20:01
On Friday, 16-Novenber-2007 at 7:50:39 Tim Johnson wrote,
>Nothing beats the interactivity of a console tho'.
>I am (I think) the first person to develop an interactive
>class on programmer using rebol. My great frustration
>was that the students students wanted the "bells and whistles" -
>i.e. drag-and-drop, all kinds of windows popping up and
>plenty of other stimulus and were not able to concentrate
>on small discreet portions of code.
>
><rant>IMHO this is one of the reasons that my
>county (USA) is losing programming jobs - to much
>desire for stimulus on the part of younger generations.
></rant>
The kids are aways right Tim - never forget that! ;-)
And they have a point. They might not know how to say it, but they'd instinctively know
that it'd be much easier and faster to create a GUI using point & click than by typing.
A mouse & GUI will have been the only way 90% of them have ever got things done on a
computer, since that's been the default interface on personal computers for over 20 years
now.
And point & click should be how you drag the kids into getting interested in coding.
Use a top-down instead of bottom-up approach. Start with designing the interface (using
drag-and-drop) and move from there down into the coding and making the interface work,
not the other way round. (That there may not have been a suitable REBOL tool around
for this approach isn't the kids' fault - they were still right.)
Oh, and you're losing programming jobs because those from Asia are much, much cheaper.
The observant kids might've noticed this too and realised that coding in the future
might be no more lucrative a job than being a factory or farm worker is now.
(When J. K. Galbraith was asked where he got his work ethic from, he used to always reply
with "You've never worked on a farm." Was reminded of this quote when a certain someone
said he wouldn't want to be a professional vineyard farmer... The irony of this is that
down here in NZ, which is basically one big farm, vinyards are seen as farming-lite;)
-- Carl Read.
