[LUAU] Re: Hosef

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

Tim Newsham wrote:
> I always thought that python should be taught to young students 
> (elementary, high school, first year college or non-cs college 
> interested in programming).  Its fairly "clean" and easy to learn and 
> use without having a deep understanding of programming.  I showed my 
> wife, who is not technically inclined, a few things and she got it 
> pretty quickly.  Its still fairly new though and I wonder how many 
> teachers who teach this class of student knows about it.
>
> I think it would be great if HOSEF could play some role in pushing 
> this kind of knowledge to teachers who could then have an impact on 
> young minds.
I think everyone will look down at what I am going to say, but I feel 
obligated to mention it.

The programming skill that is most critically needed is, hold your 
breath, StarBasic (or any Visual Basic equivalent that works with 
OpenOffice.org).

If we want our hope of migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org 
(& eventually from Windows to Linux) to have any chance of success (& to 
help Massachusetts' brave move to standardize on ODF), we will need an 
army of professional as well as amateur StarBasic programmers who can, 
at least initially, efficiently convert Office macros to OOo 
equivalents.  Of course, when the skill level elevates, we can further 
talk about embedding python, MySQL, or even plone scripts into OOo via 
UNO bridges.

I am trying to help a couple of non-profit legal clinics to switch to 
OOo/StarOffice.  Lack of StarBasic programmers is the most determining 
bottleneck.   Wayne