All these newbie questions that are answered by documentation
All these newbie questions that are answered by documentation
- Subject: All these newbie questions that are answered by documentation
- From: "Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 14:31:44 -0600
It seems to me that most of the newbie questions that are easily answered by
documentation and keep recurring in this forum and others are due to 4
general causes:
1) People seemingly refuse to look at the super class's documentation
2) Sherlock sucks so bad that people will not use it to search the
documentation and newbies can not be bothered to use MTLibrarian or another
search tool.
3) There is a lack of good concepts and overview documentation. Newbies
refuse to just dive in and read the details about classes. They seem to
want broad overviews that at least tell them where to look. Combined with
the fact that newbies don't even know the terminology to use when searching,
they can not find anything.
4) Familiarity with C++ and MFC has warped their minds to the point that
they just can not understand a dynamic language like Objective-C and
flexible frameworks like the Application Kit. A refusal to change mindsets
locks people out of Cocoa.
I see several solutions:
For 1), Apple could include every method from every superclass in the
documentation for every class. That would only expand the size of the
documentation by a factor of 5 or so, but then people would not have to look
in more than one place as often.
For 2), Apple could/should just scrap the shitty Sherlock and revive Digital
Librarian or something better. People could also start using google.
Google is very handy for searching Apple's on-line documentation.
For 3), more is better, but most of the newbies posting have never bothered
to read Object Oriented Programming and Objective-C. I don't know how we
can expect these people to read any kind of overview if they are not willing
to even learn the language of the frameworks.
For 4) If people will not change and/or can not see the advantages of a
different way of doing things then I don't think Cocoa will ever appeal to
them. I suggest that we forward all such people to the Carbon lists.