Re: Fredrik Hübinette Book

2021-10-20 Thread william

On 2021-10-19 23:36, Duke Normandin wrote:


But it doesn't have to be a mere summary! It could be the
whole-meal-deal - one point at a time! And it could be expanded for
more advanced features!


That doesn't really seem to be the approach taken in any of the 
documents I've looked at (nor does the website's tagline suggest that's 
the purpose). It also seemed to me that the format becomes hard to 
follow for some of the longer documents (such as Java).


But that's just one person's opinion.


Because it could be a community effort, there would be no need to
wait for yet another book(s), or blog(s) to be written as time
permitted. The initial time and effort would certainly be
non-trivial, but IMO it's absolutely necessary to spread the use
and usefulness of Pike. Unless the few core developers would rather
the language remain a close-door, private project. In which case
the public should not be exposed to the language at all.


I don't think that the core developers have an opinion one way or the 
other about it, and it wouldn't really matter if they did: It's simply a 
matter of someone dedicating time to the task.



> It would not do your book project much good though. IMHO, Pike and
its quality capabilities are freely available and so should
quality documentation and tutorials for it.


To be clear, it's not "my" book, it was produced with a lot of help from 
the community (as it says on the cover). Some people just prefer that 
format and those sorts of efforts aren't mutually exclusive.



The https://learnxinyminutes.com site seems to be the quickest way
to get there. A link to it on Pike's homepage would be all that is
required and newcomers to Pike would be spared the hunt-n-peck
search for a complete up-to-date set of docs.


The existing tutorial and manual are competently written documents. If 
it were me spending the time to solve the problem of having material for 
a new user learning the language, I would complete it's conversion to 
the new website format rather than starting a totally new effort. After 
that, I'd probably consider what needed to be added from newer releases 
of Pike. Obviously that's just my opinion, but the delta between it and 
the new items that ought to be covered in it are fairly small.



Anyway, this Pike noob won't probably ever see that happen. I first
looked at Pike 10 or so years ago, and like I said previously
nothing about the documentation has changed much during that
period. There must be a reason for that! Of course, maybe you guys
want it that way - a closed shop!


Having met pretty much everyone involved, I can say for certain that no 
one intends the situation to be hostile to new users. It's simply a 
matter of everyone being busy working on the code. If someone were to 
come along and start an effort such as you're describing, I have no 
doubt that folks here would be supportive.


It is certainly a problem that the tutorial on the Pike website is 
incomplete, but you never said what you thought was deficient about the 
complete document?


http://web.archive.org/web/20160305143752/http://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/tutorial/
and
http://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/



Good luck!
--
Duke




Re: Fredrik Hübinette Book

2021-10-20 Thread Chris Angelico
On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 9:10 PM Robert J. Budzyński
 wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 7:44 AM Chris Angelico  wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 2:44 PM James Latham  wrote:
>> >
>> > Dear Pike lovers:
>> > Thanks for the very informative Blog that you have created.
>> > I would love to join in.
>> > Is there any way to create a distributable pike program?
>> > Ideally it would be all in one module.
>> > Jim Latham
>>
>>
>> Yes, absolutely! I've often made one-file Pike programs. For instance,
>> I have a git hook that I use in a number of projects, and it's all
>> contained in one file (called, surprisingly enough, "githook.pike"),
>> marked executable, and with an appropriate shebang.
>>
>> ChrisA
>>
>
> Er, that assumes the pike runtime is available. I believe what Jim had in 
> mind was a situation where you can't assume that on the user's end.

Oh. Having had experience with this kind of thing in Python, I am of
the opinion that it's a lot more hassle than it's worth. Trying to
make a single executable that runs on every target platform is a
nightmare, so what usually happens is that someone spins up a thing
using the exact version of Python and Windows (it's always Windows) on
the dev system, and it won't run properly on other systems.

Much much cleaner to distribute a script and then have the interpreter
installed elsewhere.

What would be nice, though, would be to have a cross-platform way to
have a script say "hey, I need this, if you don't have it please
install it".

ChrisA



Re: Fredrik Hübinette Book

2021-10-20 Thread Robert J . Budzyński
On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 7:44 AM Chris Angelico  wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 2:44 PM James Latham  wrote:
> >
> > Dear Pike lovers:
> > Thanks for the very informative Blog that you have created.
> > I would love to join in.
> > Is there any way to create a distributable pike program?
> > Ideally it would be all in one module.
> > Jim Latham
>
>
> Yes, absolutely! I've often made one-file Pike programs. For instance,
> I have a git hook that I use in a number of projects, and it's all
> contained in one file (called, surprisingly enough, "githook.pike"),
> marked executable, and with an appropriate shebang.
>
> ChrisA
>
>
Er, that assumes the pike runtime is available. I believe what Jim had in
mind was a situation where you can't assume that on the user's end.
-- 
RJ Budzyński
Ośrodek Komputerowy Wydziału Fizyki UW
Telegram: https://t.me/robjb


Re: Fredrik Hübinette Book

2021-10-20 Thread William Welliver
If you had more complex needs, you could also explore the zip file 
module/program loading feature. I think that’s present in 8.0. I could provide 
some more details if that’s of interest. 

Bill

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 20, 2021, at 1:44 AM, Chris Angelico  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 2:44 PM James Latham  wrote:
>> 
>> Dear Pike lovers:
>> Thanks for the very informative Blog that you have created.
>> I would love to join in.
>> Is there any way to create a distributable pike program?
>> Ideally it would be all in one module.
>> Jim Latham
> 
> 
> Yes, absolutely! I've often made one-file Pike programs. For instance,
> I have a git hook that I use in a number of projects, and it's all
> contained in one file (called, surprisingly enough, "githook.pike"),
> marked executable, and with an appropriate shebang.
> 
> ChrisA
>