On 25-Sep-02, Jason Cunliffe wrote: >> What's important with your scripts is to choose good words for your >> functions and data, something that doesn't always matter as much in >> other languages. Ideally the words should suggest what they do or >> the data they represent, but it's not always easy thinking of good >> ones when you're coding - it can interrupt the flow.
> I agree. > REBOL reminds me often of'Starting Forth' by Leo Brodie. I read it > my first Amiga and started learrning JForth [for HMSL]. I he > described well the art and importance of selecting the right words. > Wish I had my copy to hand. > Starting Forth > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0138429227/002-1248362-9982457 > http://home.earthlink.net/~lbrodie/books.html I programmed in Forth and LOGO a long time ago, so REBOL's wordy-ness is not a new concept to me. While I think it should scale well, I wonder how easy large programs would be to maintain once the original programmers have moved on. "Ummm, is that REBOL code in that block, or someone's dialect?" (: >> Once you're reasonably comfortable with REBOL you don't give a >> second thought about this, though it may be that REBOL's only >> suitable to certain types of programmers. That said, I haven't >> heard any major > Yes.. > What do you think exactly it is that one learns to become > comfortable? The console and all those datatypes make your code easy to test and to trial different ways of doing things. I seem to spend more time searching for the names of REBOL's native words (which this old brain has forgotten again:) than I do in tracking down bugs. > What do think about REBOL being used as 'first' > language and/or for kids? Tim Johnson would be a better person to ask I think, as he's had some experience of teaching REBOL to kids. I'd think it would have quite a few advantages though, in that it's a functional and extensible language, but you can also treat it as an imperative language if you want. There's objects too, so it could be used for teaching object-oriented programming, but once again, you're not forced to write object-oriented code. Plus there's dialects, so you could use it to teach not only programming, but how to create programming languages as well, which would also teach there's different ways a programming language can be structured. And the total control you have over View, (and I mean View, not VID), would be I think great for teaching GUI design. The downside would be the lack of documentation, (especially for View), plus the lack of experienced REBOL programmers to teach the language. Not a good look when the teacher doesn't know the answer to a question and hasn't the resources to find it. -- Carl Read -- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, without the quotes.
