Re: Re: Gobo with EiffelStudio 5.4

On 11/08/2004, at 9:51 PM, Franck Arnaud wrote:
>  Gobo's documentation is not all it could be (although when it's
>  there it is quite good I think) and it's a known problem. This
>  is not a fault with the tools per se.

Yes, I agree with all that. I'm just trying to communicate the 
experiences of a newbie (me) in the hope that I'll encourage you 
experts to write a bit of introductory documentation. It really 
wouldn't be that much: just a couple of paragraphs explaining the 
motivation behind these tools would have saved me many hours.

>  You're confusing functionality and interface! However you do
>  it, you have to tell a tool what components make up a project
>  and how they fit together. That you click around a GUI tool
>  or type a configuration file is irrelevant, and anybody should
>  be able to do it either way.

"Anybody"? Definitely not most beginners. THAT's why it's not 
"irrelevant". In fact, to most newbies it's CRUCIAL to whether they 
persevere with it or give up because it's all too difficult. Maybe 
you're smarter than most of us, Franck.

And no, I'm not "confusing functionality and interface". I understand 
the distinction perfectly :-)

My point is that, most of the time, for most people, a GUI interface is 
more efficient. This is especially true for newbies, who have no idea 
what they're looking at. A good GUI makes it very easy to learn by 
discovery.

I'm well aware that, behind the facade, there's often something like a 
makefile or xace. I'm always appreciative of GUIs that have a back-end 
like that, because I tend to use the back-end approach once I've got 
over the initial hurdles. For example, this happened today for me with 
ace files. I've spent the last few days manipulating the ace files via 
EiffelStudio's Project Settings, but today I felt comfortable enough 
with it all to start manipulating those ace files directly in a text 
editor (Visual Studio). I expect I'll find it more efficient most of 
the time to manipulate the ace files directly, but there will still be 
times when I'll prefer Project Settings.

>  geant -verbose goes some way towards showing what geant does,
>  ... You want
>  feedback, it's not the format that is important.

No, I am *not* asking for "feedback". I am asking for a simple way to 
get started with gobo, etc. My initial problem was that I didn't even 
know whether I needed to run gexace and geant, because there was no 
decent introduction to them.

Ideally, I would want to run a setup.exe (or click a button) and it all 
happens without me having to understand much. Maybe a few questions 
along the way, which have sensible default answers. That's the norm 
these days, at least on Windows and Macintosh. I realise that setting 
up something like that takes a lot of thought and work -- I know 
because I've written such stuff myself -- and I know that gobo is open 
source. So I don't expect it to be perfect. But please, take note of 
the views an outsider. I'm highly motivated to push through these 
difficulties because I have wanted to work with Eiffel for many years. 
Those who are merely curious about Eiffel are not going to be as 
tolerant of these initial hurdles.

>  How it works when you want to use other Eiffel compilers than
>  EiffelStudio's? Integrate them in EiffelStudio too?

I don't care about the other compilers. Anyway, I should approach 
Eiffel Software about that.

>  Also it would certainly help if EiffelStudio included the
>  C compiler, so that we don't have to bother with
>  supporting various C compiler backends.

EiffelStudio installs with the Borland compiler. Actually this was a 
major cause of my problems, because the installation document for the 
package I really care about (EPOM) mentioned every compiler except 
Borland! But again, I should approach the EPOM people about that.

Thanks for your reply,
- Peter Gummer




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