Ultra Beginner Question/Request

[Alex Tweedly]

Len Morgan wrote:

> From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
>
> You may have come to the right place.  You can consider this list a 
> working group for your personal success with learning Rev.  :)
> Tell us a bit about this Tcl project and perhaps some of the folks 
> here will chime in with suggestions on how to get started.
>
> One of the tough things with learning a proprietary language is that 
> there are fewer third-party resources avaiable for learning.
>
> But one of the upsides with Rev is that this mailing list is chock 
> full o' third parties ready and willing to offer personal assistance.

They may also offer personal opinions - which may not always be what you 
want to hear :-)

IMO, it's too early in your Rev experience to tackle this project - it's 
just too big and has too many aspects where you could make a design 
decision that you later regretted. I would try to find a smaller, but 
non-trivial task to do, get that under my belt - and then be ready to 
tackle this larger project, with confidence that I had a good enough 
grasp of "the Transcript way" that I'd make good design choices.

A couple of days spent on a different problem now, experimenting with 
different ways to do things, might save you more time than that later. 
And it's easier to experiment and then discard ideas if it's not the 
real, final problem you're working on.

If you feel you have to "get started" (and I suspect if it were me, I 
would not resist), then pick a small subset of the real problem, and do 
just it - but complete it as a project; force yourself to be open minded 
about whether you're doing is phase one of the real thing or a 
throw-away prototype.

As another "trad" programmer recently (8 months) started on Rev, I'd say 
you should not feel the obligation to use the card metaphor for data 
storage - it's a great feature in some circumstances, but it doesn't fit 
every problem. Even apart from the "cards as data", it may be right to 
use multiple cards for the multiple "tabs" - or it might be easier to 
simply use grouped controls - see the discussion on this list about a 
month ago.

If you haven't already - play with the various search tools for finding 
things in the list archive - there's tons of good info in here.

-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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