On 3/31/07, Luciano Ramalho <ramalho / gmail.com> wrote:
> That's way cool, Harold. I happen to teach programming and I often
> talk about that predicament (even though I did not know about _why's
> article until I read your post).
>

Thanks for the kind words. (:

> I'm a Linux and OSX user however, so I think having LittleCoder run on
> top of SDL [1] would make it even cooler.
>
> [1] http://www.libsdl.org/
>

SDL is a different kind of animal, and one I'm only a little familiar
with. On interesting feature of LittleCoder is that *ALL* of the
boiler-plate code for booting up a window, getting a drawing context,
etc, is hidden in the C++ portion of the app. This was a top priority,
because we wanted to be able to express single line Ruby programs that
did interesting things like draw pictures and make noises. (Strangely,
opening a window is not considered interesting. ;)

The other difference here is that LittleCoder builds the Ruby
interpreter into the application.

Getting RubySDL to run anything at all is a non-trivial exercise in
installing Ruby, using gems to get RubySDL, and if you're unlucky,
some .dll dancing becomes necessary. LittleCoder on the other hand can
be downloaded, unzipped, and double clicked.

Definitely something similar could be done on other platforms, perhaps
using SDL, but unfortunately the only computer I have right now is
running Windows. I'm looking to get some linux in my life, so perhaps
an OpenGL linux version of LittleCoder is somewhere over the horizion.

>
> Nevertheless, great idea, Harold!
>

Thanks again!
-Harold