Proposal: learn Vimscript through TDD

[Drew Neil]

We have a VimLondon organisation on github. It would be cool if we could collaborate as a group to produce something useful for the Vim community. I thought it might be fun if we produced something like the Ruby Koans, but for Vimscript. If you know how to do test-driven development (TDD), then it's amazing how far you can get writing code in a language that you're unfamiliar with. Here's a bit of background...

I was introduced to the idea in this blog post by Mike Clark, who used TDD to teach himself ruby:

    http://www.clarkware.com/blog/2005/03/18/ruby-learning-test-1-are-you-there-world

The folks at Neo (formerly EdgeCase) took this idea and turned it into an interactive learning experience called Ruby Koans (<3 <3 <3):

    http://rubykoans.com/

The Koan format has been adapted for JavaScript (and probably other languages too):

    https://github.com/mrdavidlaing/javascript-koans#readme

Read this (short) chapter from Steve Losh's Learn Vimscript the Hard way (LVTHW):

    http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/chapters/22.html

I've put together a short snippet of vspec code that confirms the behaviour described in chapter 22:

    https://gist.github.com/nelstrom/5859732

For more information on vspec, see episode 50 of Vimcasts:

    http://vimcasts.org/episodes/an-introduction-to-vspec/

Here's my suggestion - at our next meetup, we get into groups of 2 or 3 and work through a series of Vimscript problems together. I'll provide an outline of suggested problems to tackle, with links to chapters in LVTHW or references to Vim's built-in documentation to get you started. If you're completely new to Vimscript, you can pick the earlier problems. If you know enough to be dangerous, you can pick the later problems. We'll create a github repository under the VimLondon organization and at the end of the session everyone can push their experiments. Together, we can create a living repository of knowledge about Vimscript.

Shall we give it a shot?

Drew

[Will Pragnell]

Count me in... sounds like it could be a ton of fun! :-D

Drew

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Will Pragnell

[Drew Neil]

Ok folks, I pitched this to the group at our meetup last night and there was a decent amount of interest, so I've scheduled a Vimscript Dojo for our July session:

    http://www.meetup.com/Vim-London/events/126387022/

Capacity will be lower than usual (around 30). You can RSVP from mid-July.

I'm looking forward to it!

Drew

[Drew Neil]

Check this out:

   https://github.com/VimLondon/learn-vimscript-the-tdd-way

Would someone like to try following the setup instructions in the README and let me know if they can get the test suite to run?

I'll flesh out the repository with a few more suggestions before our next meetup, but I wanted to get something out there quickly while the idea is fresh.

Cheers,

Drew
:x

[David Salgado]

You might want to include a bit about dependencies. It blows up rather horribly if you're using ruby 1.8.7, for example. Works fine for me under 1.9.2 though.

Also, non-ruby programmers probably won't have rubygems and bundler installed, so it might be worth mentioning that stuff too.

David

[Drew Neil]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 9:55 PM, David Salgado <da...@digitalronin.com> wrote:

You might want to include a bit about dependencies. It blows up rather horribly if you're using ruby 1.8.7, for example. Works fine for me under 1.9.2 though.

Also, non-ruby programmers probably won't have rubygems and bundler installed, so it might be worth mentioning that stuff too.

Good point. Does anyone know of a good article I can link to that shows how to install ruby 1.9.x + rubygems + bundler for mac, linux and windows?

Drew

[Drew Neil]

Ok folks, you can now RSVP on meetup.com for our Vimscript Dojo event:

    http://www.meetup.com/Vim-London/events/126387022/

Because of the nature of this event, the capacity is lower than usual. If you miss out, sign up to the waitlist to get first dibs on returns.

Drew

[Drew Neil]

I've updated the Meetup listing with more details for this month's event:

    http://www.meetup.com/Vim-London/events/126387022/

The Vimscript Dojo is on github:

    https://github.com/VimLondon/learn-vimscript-the-tdd-way

If anyone has time to clone the repo and try it out before the event, I'd appreciate your feedback. Let me know if I missed any vital information from the README!

Cheers,

Drew