On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 06:39:51 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
Am Mon, 10 Feb 2014 18:11:37 +0000
schrieb "Steve Teale" <[email protected]>:
What can be done to capture the attention of young people in
the developing world?
Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible
to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM
phone.
Is this within the bounds of possibility?
There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and
ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy
a cheap smartphone.
Any other ideas?
Steve
How did you get started?
My first language had these properties:
- it was pre-installed on my PC
- it was powering a game I played
- it was dead simple with good error detection
- I/O, audio, graphics was part of the language
It was QBasic on MS-DOS. Later with Windows 3.1 I switched to
Delphi. The feature set and my usage patterns grew:
- the basic DOS graphics got replaced with window backdrops
and "bitmap buttons", sound was provided with
SndPlaySound("some.wav").
- The internet became a new I/O source and I queried a forum
for new posts, a server for new Counter-Strike maps etc.
During this transition me and a friend from school tried stuff
for fun, like exchanging disks with encoded messages that
could be opened with our "secret network" software, for which
we split up the work. The motivation was still much about
making it look and sound cool and surpassing each other with
fancy ideas and proving that they could be implemented.
I only came to D after I switched to Linux and dropped Delphi.
By that time I wrote server code in Delphi and Java
professionally and fancy graphics was no longer a priority.
I don't think D fills the QBasic niche quite so well and to be
in the Delphi spot requires a much more ready to use
environment with everything included. And by that I mean
VisualBasic/C#/Delphi like IDE with accessible help, GUI
builder, graphics and sound. (Which is much easier if your
only target is Win32 :p)
Is there any good data on how programmers started out?
My experience was very different: I bought K&R, read it cover to
cover while trying out the examples, then tried to write a math
library, only tools involved: gedit and gcc.
