Re: on the lack of documentation (was: Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists)
Re: on the lack of documentation (was: Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists)
- Subject: Re: on the lack of documentation (was: Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists)
- From: "Roger Howard" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 11:57:20 -0800 (PST)
On Fri, December 26, 2008 12:59 pm, Ed Stockly wrote:
> A requirement for developers to make the commitment to support each
> command with that level of documentation is not realistic, reasonable
> or necessary, and may cause some developers to give up on the
> technology.
Have been following this thread (and its progenitors) since the start, but
wanted to chime in finally with the thought of documentation on my mind.
One thing I find particularly useful on the official language
documentation sites for common tools like PHP and MySQL is the support for
user-contributed comments/notes/examples... these often help to expand on,
provide examples of use, clarify, and even provide errata for the official
docs.
Since AppleScript has such a tight user community it would seem likely
that if the language guides, and even dictionaries, were somehow
integrated with an online commenting system, we'd see user-generated
documentation thrive, filling in the gaps where the developers are
unlikely to. I have hugely benefitted from user-contributed enhancements
on almost every online language guide I've used in the past few years -
finding optimizations I didn't think of, exceptions, and just seeing code
examples from peers. Such an approach, I think, would really make
AppleScript more approachable for newbies - I've been with AS for well
over a decade so I don't spend much time looking at AS references, but I
know getting started in other new languages has really been made easier
because of the availability of the community-enhanced documentation.
-R
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