Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- Subject: Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 13:11:57 -0400
On May 19, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Alex Kac wrote:
Every technology I've been able to get into easily because I could
discover the tech in my own time. Cocoa is not like that. You have
to grok the whole foundation first before you can do anything.
I don't agree with this. You have to grok it all before you work
optimally, perhaps, but that's true of any language. But you will
never grok it all if you don't work with it, make mistakes, etc. You
make it sound like a huge catch-22 in which nobody could ever learn
Cocoa without spending a year contemplating their navel first. ;)
I'm not against hard work to learn a new platform/language. Its a
challenge and I love it. The problem I have is that the docs as
written do not work for learning Cocoa in your spare time even if
you plan to go full-time to Cocoa in the future (that's my goal -
move my WinMobile dev to my other engineers and then move myself to
Cocoa full-time, but I can't just drop my projects now).
I'm curious as to why you (and obviously several others) believe this
is true - I'd like some concrete examples of what's preventing the
Cocoa Documentation from letting you learn it effectively in your
spare time. I'm not doubting you, I just think it would be interesting
to isolate what the factors are that make it work for some and not
others, because I learned Cocoa before Aaron's book was first
published almost exclusively from the NeXT documentation in my spare
time while working 60+ hours a week at a software company in the Bay
Area during the height of the dot com explosion, with a wife who was
working the same kind of hours at a software company, and with four
kids under the age of four. Believe me, spare time was at a premium in
my life when I learned Cocoa from the official documentation.
The documentation and tools today are better than they were then
because so much was in flux with the whole Rhapsody / Yellow Box
switchover from NeXT, there was a lot of uncertainty and more changes
than the doc team could keep up with. It wasn't easy - as I stated in
an earlier e-mail, I spent a lot of the first few months without a
clear picture of what I was doing at times, but to say the docs "do
not work for learning Cocoa in your spare time" is an overly broad and
patently untrue statement. Perhaps they don't work for you, with your
schedule and your way of learning, but I guarantee you that many of
the people on the list learned primarily from the very same
documentation you claim can't be used effectively for learning. The
thing that is true (I think) is that the "big picture" is more
important with Cocoa than with most other languages, so it's more
intimidating to dive in and it takes longer before you get a comfort
level.
Also, I realize that on many other platforms, it is common to see code
samples sprinkled through the API documentation/ For example, the
header of the Iterator class might show a code sample about how to
iterate using an iterator. I can see how coming from that background
could lead you to think Apple's API documentation is deficient. It's
really just that Cocoa documentation isn't set up that way - it's more
modular. To say that Cocoa doesn't have code examples is wrong. It has
them - plenty of them - they're just not in the API documentation.
Most classes have links to the relevant guides and conceptual
documentation where the code is. It's sort of like MVC, but - there's
a modularity and clear division of documentation based on the purpose
it serves; once you understand the way its set up and know where to
look for what you need, it's more than adequate.
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