[Bese-devel] Learning UCW

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Hello again,

Well, after some going back-and-forth and with the help of the members of this list, I finally seem to have a stable UCW environment under OS X with SBCL.

I have been fiddling around trying to learn UCW. However, to be honest, I'm disappointed at the lack of documentation and/or the steep learning curve required to get going with it, so I'm back here asking for help/direction.

I originally started looking at many public tutorials. However, they are all obsolete and don't even run in the current version of UCW, so I wouldn't want to spend too much time learning something that has been deprecated or that simply won't work.

I then started going through the example applications. They seem to illustrate more functionality than any of the tutorials I found. However, there is a severe lack of "explanation" bundled with the examples.

Then I went to http://uncommon-web.com/qbook/ucw_dev/ but there is also a lack of explanation/description of many of the methods and the overall "ucw development methodology".

The one thing I _think_ learned from all this is, I believe I understand the concepts around the different basic components that make up a simple application.

However, since the only running sample code I have is that found in the examples, that's the one thing I end up reviewing the most. I spent a lot of time going through UCW's source code documentation as I read the example code. Some of it makes sense, some is not so well documented.

Then, there is the notion that I see the examples make extensive use of package::function within the ucw package. If even the examples make such use of this, why aren't all these functions publicly exported so they may be formally documented?

You can say that I'm a new Lisper and, so far, seem somewhat comfortable with the "hacking" mentality that I could always go to the source to understand how things work. However, even doing so is extremely difficult in UCW because not everything has comments and having to understand code makes it that much more difficult when you don't really know where to look, so I end up looking at one file and then have to look through n files until a simple concept may be cleared up.

UCW seems to have a somewhat active community, so I ask for anyone to provide more concise direction as to how you would "welcome" a newbie into the UCW world. I don't mean any negative criticism in this email, if anything, I just hope it's for the best so more people can join this community.

I'm really eager and want to start doing something productive here, but I really feel my hands are tight in learning the available API and overall UCW development mindset.

I know there are many out there listening, just hope someone is able to respond promptly :)

Thanks again,
Daniel