[Techtalk] Ruby/Perl Tutorials

[John.Sturdy]

> My two cents. (:

Actually, very valuable remarks!  I'll pick just two bits to answer to, otherwise you could set me rambling onwards...

> Even as a non-programmer I've written my share of Bash scripts and
> JavaScript that did nifty little things

I have a split reaction to this!  My first response was "Be more positive about your programming abilities -- you can call yourself a programmer!"  It seems to be an active area of research and development, under the title "end-user programming".  But it definitely is programming.

The other part of my response was that this is a kind of activity that the FLOSS community should be giving a high profile to, to counter the claim by closed-source vendors that the availability of the source isn't relevant except to a few specialists.  Do you put your changes somewhere where others can pick them up? or write something about it on a blog or wiki?  It could be a great way to tell other people who think of "starting programming" as beyond them that you don't have to be trained, experienced, programmer to start adapting software to your own requirements.

> Comment, comment, comment!

Definitely.  An interesting variant of it that I picked up years ago was "Never remove debugging print statements when you don't need them any more, just comment them out."  This is because they tell other people looking at the code what variables were of interest for debugging it, and what the issues in developing the code were.  Obviously sometimes there are just too many and they have to be removed as clutter, but leaving some in can be a very informative form of commenting.

__John