[fpc-pascal] Working on a new way to educate people about pascal

[James Richters]

>i think he meant both...

Yes I meant both, I myself as an experience programmer cannot follow really
any of what is going on at all.. except the button that clears the message
box.  I can't figure out why there is a timer, I can't figure out how you
would change the amount of time being timed, or how to start it or how to
stop it or anything at all other than.. look, there's a timer in here..
wonder what that's for and how does that work?
Maybe a nice simple countdown timer would be a better example.

I looked up SQL on Wikipedia and yea.. that's over my head.. that is a VERY
specific and VERY advanced topic.  It's just not anything that the average
person who isn't already a very technical person or in fact very technical
people who just have no use for it would understand.  I couldn't even
understand the Wikipedia article on it.. it's just way outside my experience
and I have no idea what it's for.. but I know I don't have a use for it.  A
nice simple countdown timer would be something everyone could understand the
purpose of and be able to follow along.

I have done a few Lazarus projects, and I do understand it, but in my
opinion Lazarus is a terrible example of Pascal programming, for one simple
reason... There is never a continuous program anywhere.. it's snippets of
code here and snippets of code there.. it's all over the place.  It makes it
VERY difficult for anyone to follow what the heck is going on if you don't
have the actual IDE right in front of you.   The document itself is a
perfect example of this.. there's a block of code here and a block of code
there, but no way to figure out how anything works together.  So that is why
I said start with a console app that has a bunch of Writeln() commands in
it.. it's easy to follow, and you don't need to go here and go there to
figure out what's going on.   Lazarus and GUI applications are ALL too
advanced as an introduction to Pascal because the GUI interface requires
that you have these snippets of code all over the place.   

-----Original Message-----
From: fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal-bounces at lists.freepascal.org> On Behalf Of
wkitty42--- via fpc-pascal
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2022 4:46 AM
To: fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org
Cc: wkitty42 at windstream.net
Subject: Re: [fpc-pascal] Working on a new way to educate people about
pascal

On 12/27/22 9:37 PM, Anthony Walter via fpc-pascal wrote:
> "I see there's a timer there.. but what starts it? What happens when 
> it times out? How do I set the amount of time? Why is there even a 
> timer at all? I don't know any of this."
> 
> James, when you raised these questions are you saying that you don't 
> know, or that someone who doesn't know much if anything about programming
doesn't know?

i think he meant both... there are times when i see "wall of words" code and
can pick some things out of it but why they are there, what they are used
for, and how they operate are still asked... digging deep in the code may
answer those questions after some circuitous path tracing but it depends on
the code...

like james, i also have like 40-45 years programming experience... 99% of my
stuff is still text mode tools and apps... GUI stuff has just never made
sense to me...

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