Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I looked into using Mirah for Android programming a while back. I took a 3D tutorial for Android (in Java) and tried to do exactly the same in Mirah.

What I found was that it seemed to be (mostly) possible, but there was NO documentation on how to do most things. With someone's help, I got the tutorial working, except for 1 last bit at the end that wasn't really necessary yet. I never did figure out how to do that bit.

This is the tutorial: http://www.droidnova.com/android-3d-game-tutorial-part-i,312...

The part I never got working was the 'queueEvent' bit of the 'onTouchEvent' bit. Without queueing it, I could get it to work, but I could never figure how to queue it like that.

My sources as I left them: https://github.com/wccrawford/Hello-Mirah--Android

Without any documentation or real info out there on Mirah, it was incredibly frustration just to get that far.

I realize it's a new language, but I can't recommend its use at this point. It needs to mature and gather a community before it's worth investing serious time in.

Yes, you are 100% correct. It is a very young language and project.

I've spent the last several days trying to solidify a distribution (.zip), maven artifacts (with David Calavera's help) and refactor the codebase to make it more approachable. Last night I made some edits to the mirah.org web site, and today I may try to work on the wiki. There's definitely a lot missing as far as documentation and support, but we'll get there.

I appreciate your feedback and links to your projects. They will help us learn what needs to be better documented, and also help us produce better error/info messages from the compiler.

We'd also love to have your help :) This is OSS of course, so anything you can do to document your experiences (blog posts, add to wiki on github, ...) will help us and others.

I put together Ferrante for Android using Mirah:

    http://github.com/technomancy/ferrante

It took a lot of diving into undocumented things; it's definitely at the point where to do much you have to be ready to blaze your own trails. Though while writing Ferrante I factored out a bunch of the icky build things in Pindah, so it's much easier now: http://github.com/technomancy/ferrante

It's a huge improvement over a year ago, when I had to get Charles to fix a bunch of compiler issues just to get the simplest of apps to compile: http://github.com/technomancy/Garrett

It looks promising, but I want a few things first as well:

* docs (as mentioned)

* some kind of javadoc / rubydoc mechanism (perhaps there is?)

* a NetBeans plugin

* a pony

OK, maybe I can get by without the last one :-)

Docs...yes, we're getting there. Not all the languages features are even documented because they were added very quickly. It's coming along.

I've been thinking about a MirahDoc format. I think we could pretty much do it like JavaDoc. Potentially even make it work with Doclets.

There is an old NB plugin based on the Ruby plugin, but I doubt it works now. We'd love to have help here. The plugin is on github: https://github.com/mirah/mirah-netbeans-plugin. Of course we'd like help supporting Eclipse and IntelliJ too.

That's great feedback for Charles. I suspect he's trying to settle down the language, then push for beautiful docs. The biggest push for accessibility and language adoption is great documentation.

Cool example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com