[NCLUG] Looking at programming languages...

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 06:05:20PM +0000, grant at amadensor.com wrote:
> Ruby - The language is brilliant.   It does everything just as you would 
> want and expect.   However, it is a pig at runtime, and the runtime tends 

Being a pig at runtime is, IMHO, not an issue for teaching programming.  I
would give up quite a lot in the performance area to just have something
that's clean and obvious and doesn't get in the way of the programmers
learning to program.

> Gambas - GUI is easy, you can easily connect code to GUI artifacts.   
> However, it is not cross platform, and does not really seem to have enough 
> people using it to really reach critical mass.

I really don't know anything about gambas, but one thing I imagine is that
the users will want to be able to easily create little GUIs.  If gambas has
a nice system for doing this, I'd seriously consider it.

If it were me, I'd consider using the OLPC XO environment for it.  As I
understand it, they have a "view source" button so that on most
applications you can push this button, look at and change the source code
for the screen you're on.  I think this could be a very powerful
environment for learning.

I believe this whole environment will run in VMWare on a regular machine.

I'd at least be looking at it.

Sean
-- 
 Linux, because eventually you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork().
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability
      Back off man. I'm a scientist.   http://HackingSociety.org/