[REBOL] Re: Personal Programming and Rebol Promotion
From: nick1:musiclessonz at: 17-Dec-2007 9:54
Hi Carl,
For a year or so, I really talked alot about Rebol with friends and
students while I was writing the tutorials, and was able to introduce
it to a number of people. I have watched several teenagers, college
students, and adults pick up Rebol and accomplish significant goals
with it. That's actually the reason for my long-winded plea :)
One college student had taken a course in Java, and afterward didn't
really know enough to do anything practical in that environment. She
stopped studying guitar for a while, and took Rebol lessons with me
instead, because she had a specific programming goal in mind that she
couldn't achieve in Java. We wrote a program together that helped her
lay out knitting pattern diagrams. VID was so easy for her to
understand and work with, right away. I just helped her with some
general concepts, and helped when she ran into stumbling blocks. I've
also written a number of little scripts with music students that help
organize projects at the shop, and one student runs a web site about
duct tape art that uses a Rebol script we created together. One of
our teachers is a hobbyist C programmer. He dabbles in it, but is
frustrated, and hasn't built many useful apps. He's been curious
about all the practical code that runs the shop - I've already
introduced Rebol, he's hooked, and I'm working on him next :)
Maybe it's just because I've actually tried to draw students' interest
personally, and also because I have a lot of organized material to
show off right away, but in my experience, the same type of people who
are curious about learning html, or who may have been interested in
code but never got much past "hello world" in another language, or
who've pasted javascript code into a web page - the intellectually
curious - those people seem to have an easy time learning Rebol (I
consider them "average people" - maybe I should qualify my rant to
include only "average people who've demonstrated interest in code, but
who haven't discovered satisfying results" :).
It doesn't take much of an introduction - I just download and run this
little program, type in some functions, and it does something
interesting. I show people how to read their email and how to create
some simple GUIs. That's easy enough for anyone to "get" right away,
and it just takes a few minutes. I introduce functions, blocks,
variables, loops, conditional evaluations, data types, and network
protocols all in one shot with some short code examples. The
intellectual types who've had any other experience with any type of
code tend to be curious about the potential, just because it's so
simple to do eye-opening things, right away. I demonstrate the
mechanics of typing in some simple syntax, and then explain the idea
of assigning word labels to data (especially values returned from
functions), and they're off and running. People really enjoy creating
GUIs, and that gets them intruiged with Rebol quickly. There's hardly
any learning curve, and it's fun.
In my experience, I've seen many curious young people have fun
learning Rebol basics. It's all about the simplicity of
implementation, and the quick ramping up toward visual results and
insight into conceptual potential. There's no big download or long
install process. There's no visually intricate IDE. There's no
learning about imported modules or OO concepts before creating GUIs
and network programming. The program's tiny, everything's built-in
and simple to start with. One-liners really accomplish something
tangible and it's easy to see some useful potential, right away. The
path towards real insight and satisfying capability is short enough
that passing interest and light curiousity yields significant results,
right away. That's the difference with Rebol. I show my students how
I created the variety of CGI scripts and GUI scripts we use on a daily
basis at the shop, and demonstrate how simple they were to create, and
they just see it right away as something they can do. That's why I
think we have the potential to attract more beginner users than other
development environments. I've seen it happen, and I think Rebol's
missing out by not connecting with that market in a bigger way...
That part is opinion, but it's based on my few experiences :)
