Talk:Getting Ready to Learn LSL

Best Article Name

I agree the old name Getting SL Started To Learn LSL was an astonishingly long name for this article.

I think the new name Learning LSL misses the point and misleads. This article does not talk about learning LSL. This article talks about all the SL you have to learn before you can learn LSL. This article talks about learning SL to get SL out of the way so that you can start learning LSL. That's a different perspective than articles about learning SL to begin living the second life.

Can we do better? Is there a short name we can choose that doesn't miss the point? Do we agree that Learning SL would work better as a name than Learning LSL does? Do we agree Learning LSL is unacceptable? Is that Learning SL name good enough, or can we do better still by discovering some other more cogent phrase? SL The Prerequisite? Too arcane, yes? What name does work better?

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 16:12, 4 November 2007 (PST)

I think the new name is misleading too. I would split it just before talking about content creation and make that SL Basics (my favorite), SL Crash Course, Beginner SL or Learning SL. At the end of it I would add a section like "Content Creation" and give links to articles about learning building, clothing, texturing, animations and scripting. In doing so we contribute to the greater wiki not just the LSL Portal.

-- Strife Onizuka 17:15, 4 November 2007 (PST)

Oh, ah, progress yes, I like that, thank you. Now with that insight in place ...

I think myself I vote for the article name SL Crash Course. I like how that name conveys both the essential information of the name SL Basics but then also a hint of this article's style of getting the other out of the way for people headed straight towards LSL -- people maybe driven to learn the scripting languages of the popular systems. I'm thinking the exemplar style we want here is the  For_Dummies style: "non-intimidating guides for readers new", "a reference for the rest of us (R)".

I do also like the idea of inviting these people who came into SL to learn LSL to make time soon to also learn the rest of SL. The next thing I learned myself was how to write a profile, as User_talk:Ppaatt_Lynagh#Profile_of_Ppaatt_Lynagh explains. I think I've got that figured out in world, and I'm halfway thru the project of figuring out how to copy my profile out into my user page, in these early days before our wiki gets that right itself already.

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 18:15, 4 November 2007 (PST)

I really like the idea of splitting up the article and breaking out into a quick start and a content creation section. The name of the article raises the question of the article's focus.

You could re-slant the article to not be LSL-specific. So a new SL user might read the article, even if they're not wondering how much SL they need to know in order to try LSL. If that's the direction, then names like SL Quick Start and SL Crash Course do make sense.

If the current slant (covering enough about SL to learn LSL) is maintained, then a name like LSL Prerequisites might make better sense.

BTW, I love the other changes you've made here. --Steamy Latte 17:46, 5 November 2007 (PST)

Before Trying LSL would work as the new title of this article, I think. Agreed?

That title gives the meaning of LSL Prerequistes without resorting to a Latin choice of words. That title also distinguishes this SL Crash Course from the Help:Getting started in Second Life written for people who find SL interesting in itself, rather than seeing SL just as a vehicle for running LSL.

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 13:52, 6 November 2007 (PST)

If you want to write an article on getting started with SL, there already is one.

SignpostMarv Martin 00:03, 6 November 2007 (PST)

I think somehow the English here was so bad that you have missed the point twice. I think it was you who mislabeled this article "Learning LSL" without any discussion here. I see you refer to the Help:Getting started in Second Life article using an obscurely different name for that article. Does reading thru all this thread here now above make the distinction between the two articles clear? Here we're collaborating on an article to clue in the person who came to us by way of an interest in LSL, not by way of an interest in SL per se. Get it? A pedagogical goal consistent with the purpose of this wiki, yes? -- Ppaatt Lynagh 13:52, 6 November 2007 (PST)

1. If this article is meant to cover the prerequisites of learning SL, and that learning how to use SL is one of those prerequisites, the article should not cover topics already covered in other articles.
2. If this article brings up information on topics covered by other articles, the information should be moved to the other articles in order to improve them.

It seems that this article is only meant to be a guide to show a newcomer to Second Life how to code in LSL. Steps 1 through 10 in the article are therefore "out of scope" of this article, and the information should be merged into Help:Getting started in Second Life

What is this article meant to cover that Help:Getting started with LSL doesn't ?

SignpostMarv Martin 01:09, 7 November 2007 (PST)

Yes excessive redundancy is evil. Other than that, as yet we're all still talking past each other.

Wow. Three times running now we're totally missing each other. I feel never heard, as yet.

No no no. Exactly backwards. Not the prerequisites of learning SL. Only the prerequisites of learning LSL.

This article should teach nothing about LSL. This article should end by pointing to the first lesson in LSL. This article exists to give a crash course on how the newbie can get from knowing nothing, never having launched SL, to the point of being ready to accept the first lesson in LSL. The idea is that this would be the first click, with the tutorials on LSL per se being the second click. For example, if steps 1 thru 10 are on SL and steps 11 thru 13 are on LSL, then 11 thru 13 should move elsewhere and 1 thru 10 should remain.

I hope to return soon. I can't stop now to confirm the 1 thru 10 vs. 11 thru 13 theory. What I specifically remember is finding the LSL Portal that interested me and then the LSL Tutorial I could not understand because I was missing SL fundamentals. Sure it may be that routing me back into general SL stuff could have helped, but it's not obvious that would have helped, because I wasn't interested in SL per se, I was only interested in getting SL out of the way so I could begin playing with LSL. The service we offer here is the for dummies crash course that only tells you what you need to know.

Maybe an analogy would help. Suppose someone invited a newbie to a meeting in SL. What do we have to tell that newbie to get that newbie able to attend the meeting, without disrupting the meeting? Help:Getting started in Second Life is broader than that, no?

Get it?

I guess I can next help best by reviewing how the LSL Portal links to tutorials such as this article and the Help:Getting started in Second Life article. If I can get to me your clear view of exactly what points are redundant, then I can recommend some kind of division, maybe three articles, with the two legacy articles referring to a new common article.

Get it?

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 05:36, 7 November 2007 (PST)

If I'm understanding you correctly, you found that existing articles were deficient, so you created a new one which covered the same topics. Am I correct ?

SignpostMarv Martin 13:22, 7 November 2007 (PST)

Yes and no. My own once-in-a-lifetime newbie experience ran two months ago, my memory is now unclear.

By now I'm only sure that I found the existing wiki deficient. Maybe not any one article per se, rather the navigation required to discover that we already offer the newbie overlapping articles, none of which clearly applied to the newbie more interested in LSL than in SL. Certainly we still now can run thought experiments -- newbie simulations -- to point out surprises that might astonish and discourage LSL newbies:

Surprise 1. We place an early navigation roadblock in the way of new people. We have actually created two paths labeled Main Page > LSL Portal > Tutorials. Giving the same name to two different things is never helpful to the newbie. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:LSL_Tutorials is where the upper right Tutorials link takes you. LSL_Tutorial is where the lower left Tutorials link takes you.

Surprise 2. The "Category:LSL_Tutorials" article doesn't yet link to the Help:Getting started in Second Life article.

Surprise 3. The "Help:Getting_started_with_LSL" article correctly explains that tutorial is the second step for an LSL newbie, not the first step. That article describes the first step as "you will need to be familiar with the basic principles of Second Life and have general building skills before you can make use of everything in this tutorial", with no links to explain how you do that. A newbie might conceive this "Before Trying LSL" article as the missing link there.

Surprise 4. The "Category:LSL_Tutorials" article doesn't yet link to the LSL Tutorial article.

Surprise 5. Get it? We don't appear to have thought this thru reasonably -- the experience of a complete newbie, attracted to SL by way of LSL.

As for this conversation, I'm not yet sure you're yet giving me credit for the depth of my newbie ignorance. I don't yet know how to link to "Category:LSL_Tutorials" more concisely. I don't yet know how to rename an article. I haven't yet memorised the redundancies between "Before Trying LSL" and "Help:Getting started in Second Life", etc.

If I find time before you reply again, I'll work to compare this article with "Help:Getting started in Second Life" to see if I can propose a way to sort out the redundancy without making the answers less well-linked and without making this answer less appropriate for service as the missing link from the "LSL Tutorial".

Am I yet making any sense? I'm not trying to be impenetrably obscure, I am trying to share my remembered newbie pain and to help supply a fix for it, in the interest of the newbies who follow after me. I do remember often getting lost in the wiki, I don't remember exactly how.

Sorry I was slow to reply this time. I'm enough of a newbie that somehow my set up to watch this page didn't notify me that you had replied. I didn't see your reply until I returned here to volunteer to try and make sense of the redundancies you have pointed out between "Before Trying LSL" and "Help:Getting started in Second Life".

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 12:12, 10 November 2007 (PST)

Table Of Contents

Ah. That's it! Thanks to Strife for adding the TOC of section as the way to number thirteen complex items. That change has fixed the main trouble with the white space, I think. -- Ppaatt Lynagh 13:40, 3 November 2007 (PDT)

It was hard to read, a big wall of text, It needed dividing and the lead sentences were essentially headings anyway. I personally prefer the TOC on the right as to not waste article space (though it similarly could be placed on the left in the same fashion). -- Strife Onizuka 17:18, 4 November 2007 (PST)

Gobbledygook

This page is very hard to understand. After reading this page I really have no idea how I'm supposed to get started in SL.

And I'm saying that as someone who's already created objects and written some cool scripts in SL. --Steamy Latte 16:35, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

So let's fix it. What's the first word you trip over? Or how else would you fix it? -- Ppaatt Lynagh 16:43, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

I added something at the beginning that I felt would make the tutorial more understandable. I didn't do a major overhaul of the remaining text that was already there, but I'd love to spend more time on this and make it really sing -- if nobody has any objection, that is. --Steamy Latte 16:51, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

I agree your new beginning improves this article. I'd love to see you make this article sing.

I think no one should object. The fine print we attach to every contribution includes the phrase "if you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here". Me, I highly value that freedom to work together more easily by thinking of all submitted text as our imperfect text, forgetting as quickly as possible that the pieces of the old text that I typed myself once bizarrely did appear perfectly beautiful to me.

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 17:16, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

By the way, I'm reminded of the http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html argument: "to become popular, a programming language has to be the scripting language of a popular system".

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 17:16, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

You have a fantastic perspective, Ppaatt!! In that case, I'd like to take the existing observations (which have loads of helpful information in them) and expand the text to make them even more useful for a newbie. I'll be very happy if someone dismantles it all later and makes it even better.

--Steamy Latte 09:49, 2 November 2007 (PDT)

Kind words! Thank you for those, also for your open invitation to everyone who can help us hereafter, also for the delightful edits of the article - a great leap forward now, I agree. I think it sings!

As for suggestions on how to next approach perfection yet more closely, ...

1. I think we could/ should make more clear the fact that the student can start scripting when all the student know's is how to make a single prim cube. The programmer learning to script in SL doesn't have to get into multiple prims til later.

2. I'd vote to think back thru some of the white space/ font design. I was somehow slow to appreciate visually the textual convention we have now established of beginning each point with a summary of its meaning followed by explanatory details.

3. I wonder what we mean when we say premium membership delivers benefits to serious scripters. I've collected ~L$200 thru camping while I debug scripts. I found my way to Sirena's Workspace Buster for moving in 3-space to a private corner of a public sandbox. All the same, the Describe Chatter script correctly reports my DATA_PAYINFO says no credit card registered, no credit card used. What am I missing? (This is an academic point. I spent all my money on my computer -- now I don't have the money to go premium -- but I'm curious?)

-- Ppaatt Lynagh 13:12, 2 November 2007 (PDT)

Those are great suggestions. I went back through orientation and re-ordered the steps to bring them in line with what I experienced -- some of your original orderings may have been restored in the process(!). I also edited the text to take account of your great suggestions.

Feel free to make any more changes, I think I'm done with this for now and I'm going to look at some of the to-do's and also try to improve anything else I bump into that needs work.

Love, Steamy 16:45 2 November 2007 (PDT)

I appreciate your enduring volunteer spirit.

I suspect the to-do's you mean are the LSL_Portal_To-do list including the Category:LSL Needs Example list and the hopes of creating Category:LSL FixMe, and Category:LSL Stub lists.

Glad you liked the suggestions. Sounds like I should give us all a rest before discovering more suggestions for this article. I did glance at the article yesterday, I didn't feel any suggestion strongly enough yet to remember it today. Thanks again for making the article sing. -- Ppaatt Lynagh 06:39, 3 November 2007 (PDT)