On 4/30/2020 2:08 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 1:14 PM Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote:
After a few days attending to other things, it is time for me to get
back to learning Whimsy.
I can go in either of two directions, Ruby or node.js. Each involves
getting fluent in a programming language in which I've only written tiny
programs, as well as learning my way around Whimsy. Neither language
looks particularly difficult, except perhaps for understanding "this" in
JavaScript's object and class model.
If all of Whimsy gets converted soon to node.js, time spent learning
Ruby would be wasted, and I should go for node.js. On the other hand, if
substantial portions of Whimsy remain in Ruby learning it will
contribute to the bus factor for those parts of Ruby.
Opinions? Any other considerations?
If what you want to work on is forms and reports (i.e., things that
HTML is good at) and NOT on the board agenda app, the roster tool, and
the secretary workbench, then the short term answer is Ruby. And that
will either turn out to be the right long term answer, or there will
be a well defined transition path. Even if all the tools end up in
JavaScript, that isn't going to happen in weeks or even a small number
of months, and your HTML skills and overall design will transfer over.
Syntax wise, JavaScript has a lot in common with C, C++, Java, and C#,
so you likely will pick up the syntax quickly. Semantically,
JavaScript actually has a lot in common with Ruby and Python.
If the above doesn't describe you, then one way or another, you will
need to learn a substantial amount of JavaScript. That's either in
addition to Ruby (and for that matter, you will need to learn the
capabilities and limitation of the Ruby2JS[1] library I maintain), or
it is instead of Ruby.
I don't want to mislead you about my HTML skills. I understand the basic
concepts and syntax. On the other hand, my last professional user
interface experience was in the 1970's. I don't think modern user
interfaces focus quite as much on organizing input into 80 column chunks.
I am much more into algorithms and data structures than user interfaces.
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- Sam Ruby
[1] https://github.com/rubys/ruby2js
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