Re: Programming beginners' documentation

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

Hakki Dogusan wrote:
> Hi,
> Jim White wrote:
>> [snipped] [snipped everything]
> 
> (It may sound funny to suggest an editor to study Lua but..)
> 
> You may look wscite (www.scintilla.org) editor for a friendly
> environment to write Lua programs and test/run via it. In addition
> you'll get a good editor for Python too :)
> 
> To start:
> - download wscite from
> http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scintilla/scite176.zip?download
> - unzip somewhere
> - double-click SciTE.exe
> - write:
>   print("Hello, World!")
> - save as hello.lua
> - Press F5 /or Menu-Tools-Go

The F5 in SciTE requires LuaBinaries to be 'installed' 'by hand'.
If it's not LuaBinaries, one might get the executable name wrong,
then you'll need to tweak the property file. LuaBinaries is
distributed as a zip archive. This requires the beginner to know
how to deal with a zip archive. If compressed folder is enabled,
it could be troublesome. The beginner might not have WinZip or
7-zip handy.

Then, the beginner has to set up the path to the binaries, and
there is more than one way to do this on WinXP. We usually use
file extensions, but a standard WinXP setup has file extensions
hidden. The beginner will also need to be able to find and open
the reference manual by himself, ditto with the samples.

(The convenience Lua installer is a possible alternative, but it
does not have documentation and the executable name is different,
among other things.)

Note that all of the above has to be done and set up manually. If
you recall the original problem(s), one of it was that a beginner
expects the convenience of a installer executable, and probably to
access most materials from the Start menu. So I think the above
suggestion cannot be practical advice to a beginner.

Please remember, others do not have the amount of knowledge that
we have collected in our heads over years. A real beginner does
not have this advantage. Have you seen a non-IT adult or a child
start to use a modern computer with zero previous experience? It's
miles from how you and I operate. Even how we operate a mouse is
vastly different -- we have exquisitely trained muscle memory and
targeting practice; I've seen new users having problems targeting
accurately and mixing up left and right buttons. Don't even try
asking them to use a context menu. Any complex steps need to be
written out as a step-by-step list. Any task we do they might do
one or two magnitude less efficiently.

Do think thoroughly about the position a beginner is in. To
support beginners who have limited knowledge on how to use and
operate an operating system effectively with a special binary
distribution is non-trivial and it needs real commitment and a
sustained effort. Otherwise, we aren't really supporting
beginners; we are supporting users with at least a certain amount
of requisite skills and knowledge. Note also that Microsoft
doesn't teach Windows users to use the command line anymore -- OEM
packs have starting materials designed for the lowest common
denominator, and learning a programming language often requires
the use of a command line. This is not an easy problem to solve,
other than to somehow ask the beginner to acquire those knowledge
on his/her own.

So, if we, for some reason, want Lua to be approachable by, say,
high school students with almost zero prior computer usage
experience, then we need far better suggestions. Reaching out to
real beginners cannot be solved in a trivial way.

-- 
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia