Hello,

I'm still a lurker enjoying watching this list grow and admiring Ed and 
Paul''s patience, diligence and good humour in answering questions and 
requests. If there is one secret to making an open source project grow 
it must be this.

However, I make one of my rare interventions as you have branched into a 
subject which is not about dabo expertise. And, IMHO, you have so far 
not answered the questions. This question is about education. This 
question is probably from someone in the actual target audience of dabo 
- someone who just wants to use it, not to learn it. But he is clearly 
making a big effort to learn.

I enjoyed the digression into editors but editors is a developer 
playground, not a users. So, one must assume from the nature of the 
replies that dabo is still a long way from being a users tool. That 
doesn't matter. So, the questioner needs to learn. The best reply that 
I've seen so far is, in effect - don't. Don't learn, do. Schools and 
education in general have a lot to answer for. One of the mental burdens 
they laden us with is that you have to learn 10,000% of what you need to 
know before you start using it. That is ridiculous. Just decide what it 
is you want to do with dabo (and that process might make you realise it 
isn't dabo you need) then just get on with it. Fire questions at the 
python list, at this list. Google for words you don't understand. Write 
code. You clearly do not have that great enemy of learning, being too 
proud to admit one doesn't know.

On a Filemaker list I follow someone asked for an explanation of a self 
relationship. I had not long done this myself and I told him the only 
way to know what a self relationship is is just to create one and keep 
trying till you get it. In general to learn, you have to either be able 
to create a mental image of what you need to know, which means you are 
three parts there already, or you just have to get on with it until that 
model forms.

Enough of sounding of that a poor man's Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hopefully 
the post I am responding to will be the beginning of a users list,

Norman Winn

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