[Gambas-user] Restructuring the official Gambas examples

[David Robertson]

On Tue, 2013-04-30 at 21:37 +0200, Tobias Boege wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Apr 2013, Beno?t Minisini wrote:
> > Bbe more concrete of what "levels" you want, and then we can use real 
> > names instead of numbers.
> > 
> 
> I'd go with the majority's observation: two levels, namely Beginner and
> Advanced.
> 
> > The current example grouping is arbitrary. You may have a different 
> > grouping for basic/beginner examples than for advanced examples or 
> > whatever else.
> > 
> > Just make a list of examples, and then we can decide how to group them.
> > 
> 
> Of course the above binary distinction will be different. To be honest, I
> didn't yet look at specific examples to group them newly because my cardinal
> problem is to offer both: the arbitrary, topic-based grouping, because we're
> all used to it and it's just sane, *together* with the niveau-based one
> which should help newcomers to pick the right source to learn from.
> 
> Actually, the topic grouping will *further* help newbies to navigate through
> the examples according to their interest. Who would pick a Beginner example
> from "Multimedia" without knowing about "Basic"?
> 
> The best thing I could think of - in order to combine both views of the
> example tree - is to leave the group display as is and sort all the projects
> according to their niveau level, i.e. Beginner or Advanced (maybe with a
> visual separator between the groups, if that's possible?), and print that
> level somewhere around the example's description.
> 
> I'm still looking for people's opinions (or Bruce's criticism) to get a
> representative consensus - maybe it's a flaw in our modern upbringing :-) -
> because examples are things that all have to be content with and that I
> don't want to change on the fly. (Sorry if this practice annoys anyone.)
> 
> Regards,
> Tobi

Tobi, you wanted feedback. I am obviously strange, because in the three
years I've been using Gambas I've looked at the examples four times and
only once did they help. So I read the documentation :)

Examples are obviously a good thing to have, but only to give you some
ideas on what can (and maybe what cannot) be done with the language.
More important is to get the documentation more complete.  Most of us
probably won't be doing things with Gambas like multi-level class
inheritance, and if you try to demonstrate everything by examples it
will be impossible to direct the newbie to the right example easily. So
the techniques used in the "Advanced" examples should be put in the
documentation, in my view. Documentation is the key.

Of course, having said that, I'll now have to do something to help with
the documentation!

Thanks for listening.

David