How to learn using Pliant ?

Goals of Pliant hard core site

The Pliant hard core site is intended to provide as many informations as possible to people who want to start using Pliant for developing tiny applications, or want to master it up to the point to be able to adapt it to their own needs.

The bonus is that it will also provide strong computing culture notions, so might be very interesting to read even if you don't care about Pliant. There is a lot to read on the web about is product A better than product B, but few about computing culture. An important goal of this site is to make the reader understand that any software relies on a computing model, just like a house stands on top of foundations, so can hardly get beyond the limits inherited from the computing model trade off just like a house can hardly grow higher than it's foundation strength capabilities.

The site will be organized as a set of small articles, each providing computing culture oriented introduction to the subject, or explaining how to do something with Pliant, or describing how some part of Pliant code is led.
Articles are grouped in sets, each set dealing with one key part of FullPliant (the language, the user interface, the storage) and starting with an introduction article that explains design choices and is more computing culture oriented, with the next articles being more practical.

Additional services such are source code browsing are provided. Everything is cleanly mapped to URLs, so that you can use either www.fullpliant.org web2 site, or hc.fullpliant.org web site, but www.fullpliant.org is easier to use since it provides a navigation left window and easy to use input forms.

Targeted audience

Since Pliant is a fairly large project, the solution I've selected is to write fast within the Pliant document editor. This brings several drawbacks:
First, there might be a lot of not clear parts and even mistakes at first, so articles will be continuously reworked over the years as opposed to mainstream publishing standards.
Then I'm not a skilled writer nor is English my mother language, so wording is poor.
And lastly, the presentation is constrained by Pliant document editor currently very limited capabilities, so there are no nice things such as tables or schema that could make learning more attractive.

On the other hand, I'll try to provide enough informations so that no computing skills should be required to read it. Anyway, once again, I'm not an experimented teacher, nor a skilled writer, so I will probably fail to achieve it in the early days. As a result, you are welcome to ask clarifications, request extra computing culture introduction, point out mistakes and send comments to: hubert.tonneau@fullpliant.org
Please just use 'Pliant hard core site' in the subject of your mail in order to increase the chance for it not to end in my spams box.
It is also now possible to add comments at the bottom of all articles, provided you use the web2 www.fullpliant.org as opposed to the static hc.fullpliant.org web site.

Given my just specified writing skills limits, a single site for both managers and computing specialists is probably too ambitious, and at least not marketing wise. That's true. On the other hand, I myself read very few articles about technology that provide deep enough ideas as opposed scratching the surface or following the new is fashion trick. As a result, I believe that in the the end, I might succeed make people that spent enough time and energy getting over my harsh writing feel that it did worth the effort, and I find it a good enough realistic target.
As I'm writing, I just try my best to stay in the middle of two fatal issues. One would be trying to avoid making anybody angry, with the result that many arguments would have to be fuzzy, and  the nasty side effect that the classical answer 'it's already roughly what we are doing' could stand making reading worthless. The other would be flame war that would go beyond facts, with roughly the same result.
As a result, the wording tend to be less polite, less neutral, and full of poorly written sentences compared to standard academic wording, but also full of reasonably strong arguments, so not easy to read, compared to standard marketing wording.
Anyway, the most serious challenge I face is finding a reasonably short explanation of the deep conclusions I got through years of thinking an experimenting a lot on the field. It would be much easier, and more serious in facts, to just report my personal path, but it would be very long and quite boring to read since each concept is the result of several try and failures with a lot of cross influences.

In very few words, Pliant hard core site is for the braves only and will probably remain so quite some time if not forever, but it is expected to become useful for non specialists that want to acquire computing culture.

Contributions

Proper wording changes are not expected at the moment, and the reason is that I have to find my way of writing, so trying to stick to the way others do does not help.
On the other hand, you are welcome to pick one of the articles, and write it properly with bells and whistles, or write extra articles. Just drop me a mail and I will add a link to your contribution.

I'm not very much interested in sites that would copy and reword most of this site, but I'm very interested in contributions that concentrate on one aspect of Pliant and handle it extensively. The reason is that Pliant is quite large so contributors that want to embrace it all tend to fade and surrender quite soon. On the other hand, contributors that will concentrate on one subject will provide extra value so are more likely to be properly rewarded for what they do.