Re: Dictionaries was Re: Scripting Mail:get selection
Re: Dictionaries was Re: Scripting Mail:get selection
- Subject: Re: Dictionaries was Re: Scripting Mail:get selection
- From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 16:48:56 +1100
On 26/2/03 3:56 PM +1000, Jon Pugh, email@hidden, wrote:
>
However, I didn't even have anything to do with InDesign's documentation
>
(which is pretty complete; Shane's read it and look how much he knows), much
>
as I suspect cricket doesn't have anything directly to do with Mail's
>
documentation, aside from implementing things that it describes.
This is an important point: I've got some apps with great scripting
documentation, all done by writers. And I've got some examples of well
meaning attempts by programmers that are, well, from not very good to worse.
On the whole, not an unexpected result.
Any attempt at decent documentation needs to be out of the programmer's
domain, which probably means out of dictionaries and into what were once
fondly known as manuals.
So what people are really saying here is that what Apple needs to do is
throw more programming resources at all these apps to make them scriptable,
and then throw writers at them to document it all properly. Great, I'm right
behind you all. But when push comes to shove, as it inevitably does, I'd
prefer greater scriptability over documentation (or worse, the whole idea
being dropped as too expensive) any day.
Obviously, you can take that to extremes. Things like AS Studio are near
useless without documentation. The language itself clearly needs
documenting. But for a lot of simple apps, a collection of sample scripts
and a thick-skinned head popping up in a mailing list is a damned good
substitute, and arguably even more useful.
Where I do think there's the greatest need for good up-to-date documentation
is for developers, because that's where I think the greatest bang for buck
lies. Get them all working from the same philosophy and approach from the
start, and there should be fewer oddities to document at the end.
--
Shane Stanley, email@hidden
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