Hello,
Today I was surprised to see this commit where the Nimacros authors stopped working on that project and deleted all the past work from the repo: https://github.com/FemtoEmacs/nimacros/commit/bcadfcd40fcd4070f566accf8daaada781e9386c
Due to total lack of interest from the Nim community, this project was discontinued. However, the Della-Vos group will port the book to a functional language with a good support for nested list, dynamic web pages and type inference.
Does anyone know what happened?
Hi, mikra. Let me tell why the past work was deleted. There are only three persons who write well in the Della-Vos Group, none of them are programmers. For instance, Dr. Vernon Sipple, the main writer, is a garden designer, not a programmer. Philippos Costa, the other writer, has a minor in computer science, but he started medical residency in Miami, Florida, six months ago. You know, resident physicians work 80 hours a week, and don't have time for writing, not even in a medical subject. Iolanda is an ESL teacher, but she is in charge of proofreading only. This leaves Vernon Sipple in the project, but he needs snippets of code for every topic that he decides to treat. Vernon works in the tutorial on Tuesdays, from 9 to 12, so every week I post his requests for snippets in this forum. In general, Vernon's programs stay the way he writes them, without any improvement from the Nim community. The job of proof reading is not well done either, so the text is full of typos.
In any case, next Tuesday, I will suggest that Vernon put the text back, and that Iolanda and Marcus do the proofreading with greater frequency. I think you agree that the standards were not very high, and that Vernon's coding is not exemplar.
Most of the Nim community also have full-time jobs though.
Anyway thank you for your efforts.
I am Vernon Sipple, the person who is acting as ghostwriter for the Della-Vos book on dynamic Internet pages. My task is to give a degree of uniformity to the text, which is being written by 8 persons with varying degrees of English proficiency. As such, there is a one week Iag between the posting of a chapter and my proof reading. During this interval, you will see things such as authors writing bear for beer and programs with awful bugs.
I am posting this answer under the pseudonym of edu500ac, since I could not remember the password for the email that I created for accessing the Femto-Emacs github account. My knowledge of computer science is very basic. I can write small scripts, and that is it. This means that I will need a lot of help to continue with this work. Since you people seem to agree in providing feedback, I decided to put the draft back into github. The members of the Della-Vos group require that the snippets used as examples be very concise, one Latex page, size A4 or letter of 12pt font size, otherwise the programs will be useless in classroom scenarios. Please, keep this in mind when sending feedback. In summary, that means simply reducing the number of lines in program. The shorter the better.
Thank you for your interest in the Della-Vos didactic projects. I will seize the opportunity for thanking Lecalle for spotting the bear typo.
What I was wondering about from the beginning:
How many real Nim experts are in your group, and which advanced Nim projects have your group created already? I don't think that only Araq or Mratsim will be able to write a real Nim textbook, but I think that there are only a few candidates who may be able, maybe Mr Behrends or Mr Felsing, but both are not very active in Nim land currently. There may be some more known from IRC, maybe Mr Munch and a few other without real names. Others may be able to write tutorials or make videos for kids, but we have a lot of them already.
For your formal process: Why write in Latex still? Latex may be still a good choise when writing a book about quantum mechanics. But there is not much formula in a book about a programming language. And PDF should be not the prefered output format in these times. You do not really intent to sell a paper book? Or to sell a book at all? So HTML and EPub should be the main formats. Maybe use AsciiDoctor, Dom and Miran uses it for their tutorials.
Of course this my personal view only. And I have to admit that I wrote my physics thesis with LaTeX, and maybe I would indeed buy a good Nim book, but I am sure only very few would buy a copy.
Hi, Stefan. Vernon Sipple work in this project only on Tuesdays, so he is not around to answer your questions, but I can provide a temporary answer. By the way, my name is Philip, or Philippos, in Greek. The person who is writing the book is Vernon Sipple.
First question: "How many Nim experts are there in your group?" That is easy: None. In fact, only Marcus Santos, who is a professor of computer science at Ryerson University, is conversant with computers. By the way, I have come to the same conclusion as you, and recommended that the book be removed from github. I still believe that this project is a mistake. Therefore, we are on the same page.
Second question: "Why write in Latex?" That question is also easy to answer -- Vernon is not using LaTeX, he is writing in Markdown. Then, he uses pandoc to translate the Markdown files into LaTeX, epub, azw2, html and docx. In github, you will find the Markdown sources, and a Makefile to compile them to LaTeX. I think that it is easy to generate epub and html, instead of LaTeX.
Finally, the book will be free, which excludes publication on paper.