Software development 001

I thought Software Development 101 was too grandiose a level for the project(s) I'm going to start documenting here. This is something which has been turning over slowly in my mind for about 2 years (call it procrastination, I usually do), but a few things have come together recently.

A while ago I decided that the need for schools (by which I mean, any persistent educational structure) to support the broadest possible range of students and devices meant that educational support software should be developed in HTML, CSS and Javascript. That's not rocket science of course, and I'm sure I wasn't alone. I certainly ran across a number of writers interested in the "generality" of that platform, if not specifically for educational purposes, and the whole "Open" ideology leans this way.

The problem at that time for me was that Javascript is a pig of a language for daily mucking around. I really didn't want to learn multiple languages at that time - and still don't WANT to - and I strongly suspect most non-programming professionals don't want to either, and my PRIMARY reason for wanting a programming tool was to support textual research, for personal edification and to some extent for materials design. I couldn't work out how to read/write files from Javascript without getting involved in Node, and Node wasn't/isn't the lightweight multi-platform  tool I was looking for either. I have my own PC, Windows-n at home, a different Windows at work (which is completely UNsupportive of the idea of personal computing), plus I use Android on my phone (and subsequently, tablet) as well as an old Netbook that limps along quite nicely running Linux.

So, to cut a long story short (Ruby - hostile community; Python - hate the syntax; Java - hate the syntax) I settled on Frink. Google it - the guy who writes/maintains it has produced something which suits me idiosyncratically & perfectly. Sort of.

Pretty much the first thing I did with it was write an app to support teaching pronunciation in accordance with the methodology my school uses. It was, thanks to Frink, extremely easy to knock together something perfectly functional and perfectly usable in a very reasonable amount of time. Plus, it was a project which taught me the language, and got me interested in programming again. Not that it made me a confident programmer, because I know my weaknesses, but it made me a confident-enough programmer.

The project also taught me more about software distribution & maintenance in an educational context. Firstly, students had to install Frink first - I couldn't produce native apps - and that was problematic. It's not the instant gratification that people are looking for. Secondly, text-to-speech is a can of worms as well, and every student environment (say, 3 flavours of Android * 20+ language origins, for Android alone) needed support to produce English-sounding models (don't try and get a French phone to speak English!). Again, no instant gratification. Thirdly, the pronunciation teachers weren't that interested; certainly not enough to support the student configuration process, and perhaps as a result of that complexity, not sufficiently motivated to work on an iterative development of the tool itself. Finally, the institution we all work for wasn't prepared to provide any support at all - and that goes right down to server-backed cloud-accessible storage. Nor were management prepared to invest in the project.

No matter; I learned a lot (and I have a nice alpha-level pronunciation architecture, if anyone's interested, along with a working demo *grins*). I understand institutional thinking; it is what it is. I spent a year or so using Frink to do some research. A somewhat surprising spin off of all that research was a renewed interest in Scheme & Prolog. I'll tell that story elsewhere. I can't see the use of that yet, but I like to prepare for future serendipity.