Benjamin
Freshman Member
Looking forward to a year of creative output and discovery.
Posts: 22
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Post by Benjamin on Dec 10, 2023 13:43:42 GMT -5
I hope I'm not posting this in the wrong place. I just stumbled across this fantastic piece of software yesterday. I have zero experience with mainframe computers, but I may be interested in learning. My next steps are to learn how to use SPFLite, learn more about Thin Basic, and try my hand at some customizations. There is nothing more personal to a programmer than his or her editor. Looking forward to making friends and eventually contributing in whatever small way I can. Benjamin
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Post by George on Dec 10, 2023 14:17:13 GMT -5
Benjamin: Welcome. Yes, SPFLite will take a while to get 'customized' to your liking, that's the downside of having lots of options to play with. Don't hesitate to ask questions, we're glad to help, we realize not everything is obvious or easy to find in the Help file.
George
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Post by Robert on Dec 10, 2023 21:51:57 GMT -5
Benjamin, there's a bit of a learning curve for thinBasic, but our experience using it as a script language has taught us all how good it is. It's very fast, quite powerful and works really well with SPFLite. We have spent a lot of time tailoring its interface to work well with SPFLite, and the current level of support is really remarkable. Our users have accomplished some amazing things using thinBasic as the script language for SPFLite. There is a lot to learn, and even after some 15+ years of SPFLite being existence, it's not perfect by any means, but it works really, really well. What is here now came about because of people who loved to edit and loved editors. If that's you, you came to the right place.
Robert
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Benjamin
Freshman Member
Looking forward to a year of creative output and discovery.
Posts: 22
|
Post by Benjamin on Dec 11, 2023 9:04:52 GMT -5
Thanks so much! I'm already having a lot of fun going through the documentation and experimenting. I'm trying to "rtfm" before asking a lot of questions. Cheers!
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Benjamin
Freshman Member
Looking forward to a year of creative output and discovery.
Posts: 22
|
Post by Benjamin on Dec 12, 2023 15:26:52 GMT -5
Hey, I'd just like to say that my hat's off to whoever was responsible for the documentation. It took me a couple of days to understand how it's organized, but now that I'm learning my way around, I must say I'm impressed, especially the descriptions and examples of how to use commands. It's really refreshing after spending so many hours staring at Linux man pages (but in all fairness, the man page system was quite good...in 1976, I suppose).
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Post by Robert on Dec 12, 2023 15:39:21 GMT -5
Hi Benjamin,
I did some of it, and my involvement was kind of hit or miss, but George did the lion's share. For a while I was kind of the proofreader and editor, but as the years went on he pretty much does all of it now. If you want to see an example of my writing, see the Multi-Edit section, and a recent one I did was on EFT. George can tell you that doing the doc is harder than writing code. What examples to use? How to explain things without losing people? Did we say enough? Did we say too much? Were we consistent? Is it accurate? It never ends.
One thing I *can* say is that we spent years agonizing over the Help. And yet it's a work in progress and far from perfect. We did the best we could.
Robert
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Benjamin
Freshman Member
Looking forward to a year of creative output and discovery.
Posts: 22
|
Post by Benjamin on Dec 12, 2023 16:33:29 GMT -5
Robert,
Am I right in assuming that You and George are both coming from an IBM mainframe background? I watched a video today of a young man who has been working on a mainframe team for 3-4 years. One thing he said about the IBM mainframe tradition is an emphasis on good documentation. So, if that's true, then you and George have really carried that forward to the PC world.
You may have already done this, but it would be really cool if you and George could give a litle bio about your computing background.
Benjamin
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