Lout programming tutorial

[franck]

>If anyone reading this has grasped a particular 
>aspect of Lout (no matter how trivial you *think* 
>it may be)

I've got a very trivial one: it helped me tremendously 
to understand that Lout placing symbols are really 
two dimensional. For ages, I was bemused by the 2^n 
example you find early in the docs, until I understood 
it's really a grid:

 {} n
 2

I got that by reading the old implementation paper 
where it is described how two views of components are 
built (2 ^ n is as much (({} 2) (n)) as it is (({} n}(2)).
Although it's sort of written in the other docs, it took 
me that to realise how essential it is. (Well, assuming 
I got it right.)

I don't think we need a book-size thing, there is just 
a need for a tutorial that allows people to get the 
basic concepts (functional paradigm, galleys, layout 
symbols). Once you got the concepts, the rest is detail
which the existing manuals cover well. (I guess, I'm 
not an experienced Lout programmer.)

(It's very hard to write a good tutorial for these 
things though, like trying to teach functional 
programming to an imperative programmer -- most 
functional tutorials are total failures from a 
learning viewpoint.)

-- 
Franck Arnaud ~ email: address@hidden