TOPIC:

Recently a small team of enthusiasts launched a COBOL track at Exercism.org. It took us about a month to write the exercises and work out the tooling. It's quite achievable and the admin didn't seem to mind us adding COBOL to the 59 other language tracks they have on Exercism. My question: is there a team here interested in extending awareness of XSharp and encouraging people to learn it? Just a thought.

-- Bruce.

Hi Bruce,
I will give it a look - and maybe there are others here willing to help or to take it over.
Wolfgang

I am also interested - I already have a collection of X# examples that I have put together in my GitHub repo.

So I would be ready to start. I am just not sure how popular the site is (I have never heard about it before) and if publishing something there would have any real impact on the popularity of X#. So its more a question if its worth investing my time.

Regards,

Peter

I've recently launched a learning track for the 8th programming language (8th-dev.com), a FORTH dialect. It took me a while but I was working mostly alone. You can see the result at exercism.org/tracks/8th . I had a considerably larger team around me for aforementioned COBOL track (see exercism.org/tracks/cobol).

I am NOT volunteering to lead. I'm still working on a Euphoria track, and if that doesn't kill me, I'll follow with SNOBOL4. And I've got folk wanting help with tracks for REXX, PowerShell and ... umm ... Windows CMD.

This is only a suggestion. It's up to the rest of you to do something about it. Maybe you prefer a slow decline into obscurity, senescence and death.

-- Bruce

Hi Bruce

Thanks for your thoughts. I wonder why you feel a need to promote your COBOL thing on an XSharp website?

XSharp isn't dying. Quite the reverse.

Terry

Thank you for your prompt response. My posting was was an experiment in being not innocuous (inspired by Chris Voss' advice re the word "yes" ) . I'm pleased to see that it did its job.

I am also very pleased to hear the XSharp isn't dying. I'm also not pushing COBOL but only giving it as an example of an Exercism track. Maybe just giving the 8th track as an example was enough. Oh well.

Let's see now which vendor gets the xBase track going first: XSharp, xHarbour or Harbour.

Bruce,
I really think the contributions to Exercism should be user contributions and not come from a vendor.
Robert

You may well be right. Having said that, contributions from vendors would not be sneezed at, given exercism.org/about/supporters/organisations

The next thing I need to find then is a public forum for XSharp where suitably motivated individuals and teams may be found.

Bruce

Hi Bruce

I don't relly follow your line of thought on this. Surely this forum gives wjat you say you are looking for.

How did you find this Forum yourself? Personally I am here simply from the days of VO when still in the hands of CA.

One of the main selling points of XSharp, I would suggest is in fact this forum where you will find motivated users quick to respond to problems and help others.

Would not a simple reference to this site do the trick?

Best Regards

Terry

I seem to be doing an excellent job of misunderstanding and not communicating.

I misunderstood Robert's comment to mean I should look somewhere else to evangelise for Exercism. I misunderstood Robert to be implying that this forum is a vendor's forum not a community forum.

So,

1. There is no xBase family language on Exercism at the moment
2. There should be one (in my opinion)
3. I am not volunteering despite having experience in building tracks and in programming xBase (dBase II/III/IV, Clipper Summer 87/5.3)
4. This seems to be the place where one might find folk (with more time than I have at the moment) who would be interested in creating an Exercism learning track for xBase

If no one takes the opportunity to increase xBase's profile the world won't come to an end (obviously) but it will be a missed opportunity (again, in my less than humble opinion).

Hi Bruce,
PMFJI: your messages give me the feeling that you are in some manner involved in Exercism.
On top of the Exercism site I read also "Exercism needs donations to survive 2023".

Personally, I have my doubts that the presence of X# tracks on Exercism (a platform I didn't knew before) would attract new developers to work with X# - but maybe the X# team sees it in a different manner, and then we could discuss if invest time on it.

X# is a bit special when compared to the other languages present on Exercism: first of all, here the development team is reachable for everyone needing help, and we also have a very strong community. Cluttering our very limited resources over the different platforms makes not much sense for us (I have invested a lot of time in docs.xsharp.it creating a wiki around X#, and tried to make it a community project - but have failed).
Other than the official documentation and the forums we have also a Youtube channel where the development team puts registrations of online sessions - most of them held on user requests.

Therefore I don't see any sense for me to invest some of my very limited time creating lessions on Exercism.

Wolfgang

Thanks for a full response, Wolfgang.

I am a student, mentor and maintainer on Exercism. I play all these parts in a strictly volunteer capacity. They're not paying me for anything.

As I said in my earlier message, I thought that the Exercism community might benefit from having an xBase family language and that the xBase language vendor and community might benefit from having their language more widely known. That's all. If it's not something anyone here wants to do, fine. It was simply a suggestion (which I managed to mess up quite a bit it seems.)

Bruce