Best Practices in Rev development

[Devin Asay]

Hello list,

During the summer I have time to rethink some of the materials in my  
beginning programming course. For those of you not familiar with it  
(probably most of you) this course is part of a larger curriculum for  
teaching applied computing skills to non-techies--our Computers and  
the Humanities minor. ("CHum" for short. Just the kind of warm fuzzy  
titles we humanists love. ;-) )

One of the things I introduced last Fall was a list of "Best  
Practices" for beginning Revolution developers. It was inspired in  
part by an excellent presentation by Jerry Daniels at RevCon 06.  
Other parts are based on lessons learned over my years of HyperCard  
and Revolution development. I'm interested in your reaction to these  
recommendations. I keep in mind the following caveats:

- This is aimed at beginning, never-tried-to-program-before-in-my- 
life-type students, so it's an attempt to introduce some discipline  
into the layout and coding process.
- Coding practices tend to be intensely tied to personal habit and  
preference, so I know not everyone will agree with all of these.
- I intentionally left out detailed rules for variable naming and  
variable typing. That's more of a semester two topic in my mind.
- I want this to be a sort of "top 10" rules of thumb.

The list is at <http://revolution.byu.edu/design/bestpractices.html>

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts about them.

Are they helpful?
Could some of them inadvertently cause problems down the road?
Have I left something important out?

Thanks in advance,

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University