What was it like to learn Pony?

[ErikSchierboom]

We’ve recently started a project to find the best way to design our tracks, in order to optimize the learning experience of students.

As a first step, we’ll be examining the ways in which languages are unique and the ways in which they are similar. For this, we’d really like to use the knowledge of everyone involved in the Exercism community (students, mentors, maintainers) to answer the following questions:

1. How was your experience learning Pony? What was helpful while learning Pony? What did you struggle with? How did you tackle problems?
2. In what ways did Pony differ from other languages you knew at the time? What was hard to learn? What did you have to unlearn? What syntax did you have to remap? What concepts carried over nicely?

Could you spare 5 minutes to help us by answering these questions? It would greatly help us improve the experience students have learning Pony :)

Note: this issue is not meant as a discussion, just as a place for people to post their own, personal experiences.

Want to keep your thoughts private but still help? Feel free to email me at erik@exercism.io

Thank you!

[petertseng]

I'm still not sure I learned the capabilities. I got stuck on "iso! is not a subtype of val" for a long time when I was doing the Anagram exercise. I probably just need to read https://tutorial.ponylang.org/capabilities/capability-subtyping.html and https://tutorial.ponylang.org/capabilities/aliasing.html more carefully, I don't know.

[ErikSchierboom]

We're closing this issue as it was part of our research for the v3 version of Exercism which has just been released.

Thanks everyone for chipping in! It has been greatly appreciated.