Re: Fruit basket program alternatives for Learnability

  • From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:40:08 +0300

You are both right.

The FruitBasket demos are not a demo of the languages in which they are written, but a demo of a few GUI libraries which can be used in different languages.

For example, there is a perl program that uses Win32::GUI, one that uses WXPerl, one that uses Win Forms (.net), and one made for a web server that uses web-based forms.

But none of them teach the users how to use the variables, hashes, regular expressions, open and write to files or read from them, work with databases, connect to the internet and get data from there and many other things.

But this was not the scope of FruitBasket. The scope of these demos was to show how a simple program with a GUI can be made in different languages, because this is very important especially for a blind programmer.

I also started to learn Java by learning first SWT, even if I didn't know why some of the variables must be defined in some specific ways, because I first wanted to know if I can do what I want with this language and if I want to continue learning it better. I first started with learning SWING, but I don't like it at all because it is slower and it accessibility is not very good (for the moment).

Octavian

----- Original Message ----- From: "inthaneelf" <inthaneelf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 2:37 AM
Subject: Re: Fruit basket program alternatives for Learnability


excuse me!

the examples run the course from windows to java to scripting languages and all have the code as well as an executable or it's equivalent provided, so how are the fruit basket demo's not language oriented?

this is one of the requirements of the demo's, and the code needs to be documented as to what does what, that is another requirement, and the code is for text box, list box, button and message box interactions, common and basic workings in coding.

so I don't see the validity of your points...

inthane
. For Blind Programming assistance, Information, Useful Programs, and Links to Jamal Mazrui's Text tutorial packages and Applications, visit me at:
http://grabbag.alacorncomputer.com
. to be able to view a simple programming project in several programming languages, visit the Fruit basket demo site at:
http://fruitbasketdemo.alacorncomputer.com

----- Original Message ----- From: "Veli-Pekka Tätilä" <vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 7:51 AM
Subject: Re: Fruit basket program alternatives for Learnability


Hi Ken,
Good point about Lua et al not being very good Fruit Basket langs since
native GUis are harder to build. Which reminds me, as it stands now, the
Fruit Basket is more an Exercise in GUi layout and basic controls rather
than showing off a particular programming language, just as you said
below. Especially in libs whose list boxes maintain the strings
directly, you don't necessarily demonstrate any kind of array or hash
usage, text processing, functional programming constructs or closures
all of which are common elements in the dynamically typed scripting
languages, for instance.

So could a more involved, and possibly less graphical, version of the
Fruit Basket be developed which is more akin to language comparisons?
What if there's already a C version of WIn32, should there also be a C
version of GTK+ 2, for instance, since it is a different lib with C
bindings?

Hello Worlds as in Wikipedia don't tell much about a language:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/List_of_hello_world_programs

However, I saw a benchmark which tries to demonstrate that with just in
time compiling and dynamic optimizations Java doesn't lose much at all
to C, contrary to popular belief. Not sure how feasible the results are
but:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/5602/Nine-Language-Performance-Round-up-Benchmarking-Math-and-File-IO//page1

Another interesting thing about that benchmark is the code. IT shows you
basic arithmetic using integer and floating point types, file reading
and writing and measuring the execution times of code. This can be a
good intro to the field of the language i.e. basic data types, control
structures, file I/O etc... which are things almost everyone wants to do
sooner or later.

Another set of language benchmarks would be this one, though not sure
how the code is from a learnability point of view:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila

Ken Perry wrote:
The problem with Haskell, LUA, and Objective Caml which are all languages I have thought of doing one in are they do not have an easy way to access the Win32 environment or some way to create a dialog type application. I keep them on the list of programs I will write one in but haven't got around to it because it is almost as much work as the one I wrote in LISP. If someone writes them first more power to them but what essentially these will end up
being is direct calls to Win32 and a bit of the   programming languages
structure and syntax.

When I came up with the Fruit Basket idea I didn't think of this kind of
language maybe we should come up with another test program that instead of
displaying a graphical interface does a lot of work like looping,
conditionals, functions or methods, Not really to do anything important but
to show what the language is like when using it.
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