Re: feedback from students

On 7 Jul 2004, at 16:58, Wilson, Greg wrote:

>> John Wilson:
>> Good stuff. One critical comment is worth 10,000 positive ones :)
>
> Greg Wilson:
> I'll pass that on 

Cool :)

>> John Wilson:
>> I would very much like one of the major audiences for the language to
>> be people with no Java knowledge (perhaps, no programming knowledge).
>
> Greg Wilson:
> Agreed.  Once Groovy is stable enough, I'd like to put it in front
> of some graphic designers who have been doing some simple JavaScript
> and Flash for web pages.

That'd be very interesting. I can imagine the Java heritage & clean JVM 
integration causing some confusion :)

>> John Wilson:
>> Some of your student's difficulties arise from them wanting to
>> use Groovy as though it was Java  (they should be able to do that,
>> of course, and it's a major deficiency in the current
>> implementation that they can't).
>
> Greg Wilson:
> Agreed.  This may be my fault --- I told them that Groovy was a
> scripting language for Java, and that things that worked in Java
> should work in Groovy as well.

It should work - though we need a little list of things that are 
different to avoid confusion. Hopefully this list should be quite 
small...

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Differences+from+Java

BTW I've started composing a page of things to remember for people new 
to Groovy who've never done java before which includes some of the 
observations from your students...

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Things+to+remember?refresh=1

>> John Wilson:
>> Do you think that inexperienced people would take to Groovy (given
>> better error reporting and some reasonable documentation)?
>
> Greg Wilson:
> I think it *has* to, if we're going to build a significant user base
> in our lifetimes 

Agreed! :)

James
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