Supercard 4.8 public beta

[Kay C Lan]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 2:39 AM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would argue that you can do all of that within Livecode, thereby avoiding
> a hiatus as you get kids to transfer.
>
And surely that's exactly the same argument as those who questions the
relevance of playing with a toy language like LiveCode when you could
just start with a real language like C, C++ etc.

There is no question that you can teach a child to read by using the
King James Bible; millions of people learned to read that way because
for decades, if not centuries the family Bible was the only book a
family possessed. I wonder for how many the family Bible was the only
book they ever read? I wonder how many developed a love of reading and
for how many it was nothing but a chore?

I dare say, at the time, some would say that Dr Seuss books were not
books at all but just a collection of nonsensical words with no point
or value. But for how many children did these toy words build an
understanding of real words and a love for reading? My wife is an avid
reader (and educator) who was extremely concerned when two of our
children struggled to learn to read - one with extreme lysdexia (I
seffur to). The dyslexic was 'cured' with comics and the other was
'cured' by J.K. Rowling.

The great thing about programming languages and IDE's is that they're
like books, they come in all sorts of sizes and flavours and suit a
wide variety of preferences, talents and learning styles. I'm not a
big reader but I love Dr Seuss books, maybe there's a correlation with
why I love LC ;-) No language/IDE will suit everyone at every age at
every learning stage, but few people would not be able to find a
language/IDE that gels with their way of learning/thinking right now.

With all the discussion between 'point and click' vs scripting/typing
there is one other method that has been skipped that, as with all such
things, was touted to be the next great thing in programming:
recording. AppleScript/Automator is the only example I can think of
but I assume there are others. Automator I guess being an
acknowledgement that 'recording' quickly hit the wall and it was
obvious that it's only value was with automating repeatable processes.
Still, I learnt an enormous amount about AppleScript as a language by
recording a process and inspecting the resulting script. In fact, this
is true more so today as I use AppleScript so infrequently that
whenever I crack it open I usually record some process just to give me
a head start and a refresher on the syntax.