On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 11:06:19PM +0200, Harrison Maseko wrote: > [...] want to use the little I know to help out wherever I can; it > will help me to learn while at the same time making a contribution > to making this great language more accessible to yet more new people > like myself. What would you recommend I do?
Hello, thanks for introducing yourself! I think some of the list's stock answers for this are just write whatever springs to mind (because any code is good practice) pick up a library you might want to use, and start playing with it have a look on the wiki and see if anything catches your eye If it's interesting or useful for you, it's more likely to keep you involved. Says he who hasn't fired up a REPL in months. 8-/ I guess part of the idea of http://wiki.alu.org/Gardeners_Projects was to encourage some overlap between "what interests you" and "what might be useful for the Lisp community". > I believe I have a flair for tracking down minute details and > formulating easy-to-understand examples, when I know what I am > talking about :-) [...] My own plan was to document as many as possible of the odd things I bumped into, questions I asked, things I wanted to do but couldn't figure out. While still a beginner, these are the very questions that the obvious documents and FAQs haven't helped with. With most thing I learn, I spend a while poking about, asking on IRC, rummaging in the symbol table, reading documents... after a while I don't remember what it was I didn't understand or how any of it could have seemed tricky. For this reason, I think it can be difficult to write accessible and useful help for beginners. My collection currently lives in a straggly text file, I'm hoping it will bridge the gap back to not-understanding, at some point. Maybe it will be useful for generating FAQ items. It sounds like you might have a similar view. Give it a whirl, see how you get on? The important thing seems to be to actually write some code. So... I'm currently trying to apply enough gaffertape to the pp06 PIC programmer to make it compile with gcc + 2.6 Linux + run with the wrong hardware (NOPPP). Do I really want to port from C? Flog those bits in /dev/port from SBCL? It would be the classic form of enormous digression from original purpose, all I needed initially was a data logger! Matthew #8-) _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
