On 19 May 2008, at 1:56, David Wilson wrote:
On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Julius Guzy
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well, there is a problems with the documentation and if it does
not get
resolved then people will end up unable to write the code. I mean
what is
the point in loosing people who actually want to program this
machine and
are willing to put oodles of effort into doing it?
There's been a lot of discussion on the list lately about how Cocoa
has been so hard for people to learn, but not a lot of useful
specifics or follow-up. People haven said "the API is bad because it
refers to all these terms you're already supposed to know and I don't
know them!", and then when someone says "Did you read the conceptual
documentation?" the response is a resounding... silence. I think this
is part of why those veteran Cocoa developers are often less than
sympathetic.
The silence on my part is that I understood that bit of the
documentation.
In fact the conceptual stuff is largely a doddle. I've been familiar
with it for some time now and it doesn't give me trouble.
So I wouldn't have much to say about it except that it does have a
tendency to make things seem more exciting than they actually are.
For instance I can refer here to the idea of dynamic typing which
still requires us to have the header files present in the calling
file which isn't exactly in the enthusiastic spirit of how it's
talked about.
Indeed many of my problems with dynamic typing came about because I
took the enthusism at face value.
You say it's the most difficult piece of learning you've done in your
life, but I wonder how you went about it. It may be that the problem
is not so much in the documentation itself, as in the
"meta-documentation" - that is, guiding newbies to the appropriate
documentation in the appropriate order. Unfortunately, that can of
course be frustrated by the types who jump right in and start reading
APIs with abandon and then complain that they don't understand certain
terminology or concepts. (Not that I'm accusing you in particular of
doing this, your comment just happened to spark this response).
Well I do do a lot of jumping right in. Always done it.
Normally I find it the quickest way of becoming familiar with the
language of the particular tribe i getting to know.
After that of course I set myself a small problem, e.g. open a
window, write hello world, open another window, draw something etc.
That for me is a natural way of proceeding. The real difficulties
have come about because of the need for precise answers to relatively
simple questions. What was one of these that took up a fair bit of my
time once....
So, it'd be interesting to hear from people what they actually *tried*
with respect to learning from the documentation and why it failed.
... exactly. That's a problem. You identify it correctly.
It is difficult without keeping a diary or something like it to
remember the questions.
I tried to do this several times because I thought I might put up
some web pages about it and the discipline would serve to knock the
stuff into my head. However giving a good explanation is a lot harder
than one might at first suppose and besides, the exigencies of time
got the better of my good intentions.
Clearly the documentation worked for a large percentage of the veteran
developers on the list - personally, I own one Cocoa book, and I think
I made it through about a quarter of it before giving it up as useless
because the API was well written and conceptual documentation covered
the questions that arose. I wonder if this has more to do with a
difference in approach to the documentation than anything else.
Well this is exactly how things seem to pan out. Those who have been
doing this for some time like the documentation they have. No doubt
once I become a bit more adept I will too. But right now......
All the best
Julius
http://juliuspaintings.co.uk
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