For true beginners

[Ken Norris]

Hello list,

Over on the HC list (yes, it's still quite alive, but the activity has
dwindled to a handful of members) there has been some discussion about yet
another HC clone. The thread starter is a programmer who was talking about
building yet another HC-type tool for MS' .NET framework, which I confess I
know nothing about, something 'simple and elegent' (his words).

Of course, I directed him to Rev, but he said he thought it was geared to
the professional programming market and therefore too complex and daunting
for many people to bother with, doesn't fit the criteria of 'simple and
elegent'.

I know exactly what he means. I miss HC's straightforward GUI, and even the
'canned' stacks and scripts to modify. These are precisely the reasons that
father HC gained its popularity among early Mac users and spawned what we
now see here. If I was looking at learning to write simple programs for my
own use, or if I was young student wanting to experiment with programming
solutions and school projects, or if I was a grade school teacher needing to
relieve some pressures, or a retiree looking for an interesting hobby, or
aspirations for a small business where I needed options for its
peculiarities, or...well, you get it, yes? Would Rev be a viable option?
Maybe not, the way it appears right now.

So, in order to get new beginners truly interested in this venue, I was
thinking there should be a set of well written, simple, ready-to-use,
useful, and modifiable stacks, and also puposefully geared to breaking them
down to analyze step-by-step, and modifying them, all done within the Free
Edition. Things like a phone dialer, an MP3 playlist, a graph maker, a set
of stack templates, etc.

I'd be really interested in list feedback on this subject.

Yours truly,
Ken N.