How to describe our resources in terms of difficulty, complexity and time to digest
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
You don't have an infinite amount of time to write your app and hopefully your keystrokes will be less random than that of a monkey, so the time it will take you should be significantly less than infinity.
We have provided many resources to help you write your app: blogs, samples, templates and documentation. Identifying which of these suits which users is a challenge. Saying something is easy or difficult, alienates as many people as it helps.
Borrowing from (and bending) the infinite monkey theorem, we have chosen a classification scale to describe our content. If the goal is an app (rather than the complete works of Shakespeare), and you have a computer and some sustenance - in this case bananas - you can build your app. The question is how many bananas?
Every monkey needs sustenance, and depending on how difficult / complex / time consuming a task is, more sustenance is required. Here is our banana rating for our resources.
Scale for AppStudio
One banana means anyone who can recognize what a variable is, read a list of parameters and is willing to tinker with them, should be able to make use of the resource.
- Two bananas means if you can recognize JavaScript and are comfortable with cutting and pasting code snippets from the internet into your app, this resource is right for you.
Three bananas means you’re happy to call yourself a hacker. You might only know one language (pretty well) or might know a few (to different levels), but lots of files don't scare you, you see them as a wealth of opportunity to refactor!
Four bananas means coding is your thing. You enter 'programmer' on forms when asked what you do. Not only are you happy to explore the samples, you are building apps from scratch.
Right now you can see the banana rating in the Samples that are available in AppStudio.
New blogs will also use the banana rating to help convey the difficulty, complexity and time to digest for the content.