[OSDC Israel] Workshops

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 14:52, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> > > My proposal: Organize workshops that show people how they can set up
> > > on their computers a development environment for an open source
> > > project.
> >
> > We can do similar demonstrations for some (existing) Mozilla Plugins,
> > GIMP plugins, Web-based apps, etc. The question of course is what prior
> > knowledge we should assume.
>
> For Gimp, i can't think of any prior knowledge, because i don't have
> any - i don't know Jack about graphics and nothing about Lisp either
> (IIRC, Gimp's scripting language is Lisp-based). 

Actually that's not quite accurate. Gimp is mostly written in C. Now it has a 
procedural database with named procedures and meta-info about them. And one 
can register procedures using C, Scheme (either Script-Fu or now Tiny-Fu), 
Perl, Python, and any other language one will write some glue code for. Code 
in one language can call code written in a different language, so they are 
very flexible and interoperable. If I write a useful effect in Perl, than a 
Python or Scheme hacker can make use of it in GIMP without re-implementing 
it.

Scheme is considered by some to be a dialect of Lisp, but some people think it 
is only Lisp-like. In any case, most script-fu scripts I've seen did not push 
Scheme to its limits, but were rather calls to one procedure after another.

> But then, a workshop 
> on extending Gimp to make pretty pictures prettier can serve as a fun
> introduction to Lisp.
>

Like I said you don't need to know Lisp. As for knowledge about graphics - you 
don't need too much. While I have some practical and theoretical knowledge 
about Gimp and Graphics from online books and from soem Technion courses I 
took, I still was able to hack many things in the GIMP while knowing C 
exclusively. I often refactored or fixed bugs in code I didn't quite 
understand at first by making sure the output remained the same to the good 
version, or by simply using general C know-how.

And I can demonstrate creating graphics with the GIMP using Perl or Python or 
whatever.

> For Perl and CPAN - don't assume anything beyond knowledge of Perl
> syntax. I would even go as far as to say: don't assume *any* knowledge
> about packages and modules, except, maybe, the `use' keyword.

OK. That's acceptable.

>
> The same for Java and C. Don't assume that people are familiar with
> Cygwin, GCC flags, CVS etc. One may argue that intoducing people to
> GCC, for example, will take a lot of time, but that's the whole point
> of the workshop - to show that open source development teams are not
> ivory towers and to welcome coders into the bazaar.

Right. :-)

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

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