Hello all,

I would like to see you put out my original plan to those sites you think best, eCS , OS/2 World, etc. to see if that plan strikes anyone as desirable. If it does not, we can consider their input.

Thank you for your offer to sponsor this event. I hope it works for us all!

Stu

I simply do not understand your original plan, for all of the reasons listed in this thread.

I'm hoping you will restate your plan more clearly. It's a one week course, and if it had the items you listed, it would be a survey course. Can you select material that could be covered in one week?

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Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

Hello Neil,

I will try to express it more clearly on Sunday night. That will give me time to consider it more fully.

See you then,

Stu

It looks like Stu lost his way back here.

The programming course is something for which a lot of people have expressed interest. However, every single person wanted a different course. This makes it pretty difficult to recruit a presenter.

Here's another proposal.

We can get the best programmers available to Warpstock, and schedule some time for a programming workshop. Workshop participants will bring a programming problem, and the presenters will attempt to show how to solve each of the problems. There will be a lot of individual work, and the course will be hands-on. Participants should leave with a working solution, or at least some progress toward a working solution.

Please post a reply if you would like to take this workshop.

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Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

Hello,

Actually, I have been inundated by work. I am about half way through developing my proposal to in a lot more detail so it would be more understandable than my first one. Sorry for the huge delay.

I will make every effort to get it to you by Monday.

Stu

I just discovered this survey.

Count me in for a programming course in C. (Programming vs porting.) I think C++ would add too much complexity for a course only a week long. I think the focus should be on getting a programming environment set up.
There was a presentation at Warpstock 2009 on how many different hills one had to climb just to get to "Hello, World". When one is just starting one can be stopped by the silliest of problems. Right now, I'm trying to learn Subversion and just printing the documentation has me stopped because it is not in .txt format. One needs something called .nroff.

It is also possible that much of the instruction could simply be posted here and those expecting to attend the class would be up to that level before attending.

I just discovered this survey.

Count me in for a programming course in C. (Programming vs porting.) I think C++ would add too much complexity for a course only a week long. I think the focus should be on getting a programming environment set up.
There was a presentation at Warpstock 2009 on how many different hills one had to climb just to get to "Hello, World". When one is just starting one can be stopped by the silliest of problems. Right now, I'm trying to learn Subversion and just printing the documentation has me stopped because it is not in .txt format. One needs something called .nroff.

It is also possible that much of the instruction could simply be posted here and those expecting to attend the class would be up to that level before attending.

Thanks, Gordon, for your interest in a programming course. While Stu and I work out the details, Let me point out that at Warpstock, we will have a programmers workshop. I will assemble the best programmers I can get, and participants will be able to bring in their programming problems and we will attempt to work them out.

This approach will be much more focused than a programming course that would be oriented toward making a general foundation for programming.

Let me comment that normally there is no need for subversion in order to learn how to program. Rather, I would suggest installing one of the C compilers, IBM Visual Age, OpenWatcom or GCC, and working through a few examples.

Honestly, "Hello, World!" is very useful in getting started. If you've got "Hello, World!" to work, then you are ready for the basic C course.

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Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

Neil,

Thank you for your answer.

Yes, I know that knowing Subversion is not essential for programming. I just mentioned my difficulty with its documentation to show you the silly things that can trip up a newbie. I am getting around the lack of nroff by going to the subversion website and reading the docs there. I want subversion because I'm tired of having my REXX projects cramped or even stopped because I can't keep track of all the versions of the program I am writing.

Maybe an OS/2 version of nroff would be a good project for a C course.

Gord

Well, setting up subversion isn't something I've done yet, but like you, I feel the need to do it. It's not really programming, but rather a system administration task, but it's one that many programmers may face. Still, when we talk about a programming course, it's best not to sidetrack too much into other topics.

I'm thinking about nroff. Sure there is subversion documentation, and nroff could be used to access it. I never considered doing it that way. The online docs at the website are quite good, and there is also a book that contains exactly the same material. Now I'm sure nroff is already ported to OS/2 -- it's just a matter of finding it. Well, maybe there is more. nroff is just a simple tool. The task is to read Unix man pages, and probably a lot of the rest of the Unix environment would be needed. That's quite a lot, and while that is absolutely essential for learning to port applications from Unix, and to some degree even to run ported programs, it is another sidetrack.

The good of the course is simply to learn about writing programs on the OS/2 platform. That is two main topics, one being learning to write programs, and the other is learning how to access the unique features of the OS/2 platform.

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Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation