Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: rwallace@cs.tcd.ie (Russell Wallace)
Subject: Re: TADS seminar for non-programmers?
Message-ID: <1994Feb11.203623.18223@cs.tcd.ie>
Organization: Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
References: <1994Feb7.173419.26879@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> <9402082358591.bnewell.DLITE@delphi.com> <2jemo2$eg6@news.u.washington.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 1994 20:36:23 GMT
Lines: 37

scythe@u.washington.edu (The Grim Reaper) writes:

>>I didn't want to post the reply in the newsgroup and appear to be knocking
>>TADS, which is easily the best system available today on an overall basis.
>> But I can honestly tell you that if you have not done extensive coding in
>>PL/1, Pascal, or C (or similar languages) you will have one heck of a hard
>>time with TADS.  Better to use ALAN as a starting language in such a case.
>> It's less powerful but much easier for a beginning programmer.  I don't
>>know what level you're at, but if all you've done is a little Basic, don't
>>jump to TADS quite yet!  


I disagree with the above...

Has it occurred to you just how spoiled we've all got? :)  Back in the
bad old days, 10 year old kids used to have no difficulty in or
complaint about learning unstructured BASIC complete with line numbers
back on the Commodore 64 et. al.; and that was for the timid ones; the
adventurous ones learned and programmed in 6502 assembler.  Nowadays we
all expect software tools to take no more than 10 minutes to learn...

To be sure, TADS is not as easy to use as, say, Hypercard, but it is
considerably easier than e.g. writing adventures in BASIC.  I would say
that anyone who spends a bit of time at it should be able to acquire a
minimal level of competence quickly enough, and after that one learns
more with practice.  Remember that TADS comes with a huge amount of code
already written, that you can use in your own adventures, plus a
complete adventure with source code that you can examine to see how it's
done.

I would definitely recommend it even to nonprogrammers...


-- 
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@cs.tcd.ie
