🚀 go-pugleaf

> In article <Bz6wo3.Jz6@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> lemson@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu 
(David  
> Lemson) writes:
> Dave and I  
> taught ourselves NeXTSTEP programming in less than three months 
(and I had  
> only programmed in ... BASIC ... before), although I'll admit 
it takes  
> almost a year to get really fluent at it. Since then, we have 
taught  
> everybody else in amazingly short periods of time.

> Everyone else just has to be reasonably smart and open-minded. 

When you talk about teaching smart/open-minded people NeXTSTEP, 
are you assuming that even though they have no previous NeXT 
experience, they do have previous OOP/D experience. If this 
is the case then your comments indicate that you are writing 
mainly UI based apps. In my experience you are correct, a couple 
of "NeXTSTEP gurus" around is what you need to get people productive 
in IB/appkit/DBkit etc. It is definately *not* my experience 
that you can teach/assist in this way, OOP/D to people who have 
not been exposed to it before. It just takes time for people 
to *really* get their head around this way of thinking.

There are no mind bending concepts in NeXTSTEP to learn, just 
a question of reading manuals, asking questions and playing 
around; a volume of information to remember (and this is not 
peculiar to NeXT). But that is not the end of the story. What 
takes longer and is harder to get your head around is OOP/D. 
Now whether this is an issue depends on what you want your staff 
to do and what type of apps you write.

I would be very happy to take on staff who had never used a 
NeXT box before but would be a lot more retiscent about people 
who had no OOP/D experience.

David Lomax