Very thanks for your pow I daily use your doc and i must admit that is very good. Still Compliment
Have you any experiences about online wiki-tool that allow more developer write documentation over internet? in harbour today the only source of documentation is in changelog Can you suggest what must written in changelog for help future maker of documentation? How many day are need for update actual [x]harbour doc to muilti thread,multi windows,xbase part ? Here xharbour doc was offered to high price , do you think that we start buyng right of same clipper book with a references ? 2009/7/7 Hannes Ziegler <h...@knowlexbase.com>: > Hi all, > > I have followed this thread with great interest and would like to add my > 2cents as the external help author who has written the xHarbour docs: > > 1) Programmers are no help authors > 2) Software cannot be spread without good documentation > 3) xHarbour.com has invested into good documentation > 4) Harbour programmers have failed to produce good documentation > 5) It is impossible to create good documentation from source code > > To 1) > Programmers want to write source code. They don't want to explain in > grammatically exact words what they have done. They are satisfied when a > source code works, and are in most cases unable to explain the preconditions > for the source code to work. The preconditions, however, must be documented > (e.g. data types of parameters that must be passed to a function). > > To 2) > Users that try an unknown software rely on the documentation of it. Attracting > users to a _programming_language_ like xBase via Harbour or xHarbour is not > possible without documentation. > > To 3) > The xHarbour investment into documentation is a logical step of xHarbour.com > in providing services to the Harbour/xHarbour community. It is sad to learn > that both communities are not big enough (yet?) to justify this investment. > There is no payback of the investment achieved. > > To 4) > The open source model of Harbour did not produce enough momentum for help > authors to step in. Reason: the first 500 pages of documentation could be > copied from the Clipper docs (illegally?) > > To 5) > The creation of documentation must be separated from the creation of source > code. There is no way around this. Reasons: a) source code comes first b) > programmers are no help authors and c) documentation comes next. > > Conclusion: > I don't know nothing about contracts between Harbour/xHarbour, but IMO it is > absurd to create two times a documentation for almost the same thing. Maybe > the Harbour users should learn that services cost money, even in the open > source era. The service of producing documentation is not created by Harbour > developers but by xHarbour.com, which has bought my services for this very > issue. > > Regards, > -- > Hannes Ziegler > > _______________________________________________ > Harbour mailing list > Harbour@harbour-project.org > http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour > -- Massimo Belgrano _______________________________________________ Harbour mailing list Harbour@harbour-project.org http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
