(Apologies, forgot to reply all.) On Mon, Dec 9, 2019 at 1:47 AM ToddAndMargo via perl6-users < perl6-us...@perl.org> wrote:
> Hi Phillip, > Have you ever been to an IEEE seminar and attended a lecture > on a subject that you have intimate knowledge on hoping > to pick up some additional tips. In the lecture you keep > shaking your head saying to yourself "What, Huh? What > the Heck?". After the lecture you ask yourself why you > wasted both your time and your money? And here is the thing, > They are doing exactly what you stated are "cleanly and precisely" done. This is important: they really, really aren't. You've offered me a hypothetical in which someone discusses a subject that I'm expert in, and I leave confused. In actuality, what happened is that I read some text on a subject that I'm no expert in, and I found it plainly clear. The difference between "confusing, even to experts" and "not confusing, even to non-experts" is profound. One thing that these situations do have in common is that to a newcomer, both situations may be confusing. They would be confused by the hypothetical because in the hypothetical, the discussion is genuinely confusing. And they may be confused by the actual text, because they may lack the background to understand it, even though it's not confusing to someone who does have that background. So although there's a profound difference between the two situations, a newcomer may experience them the same, and may have no way to distinguish the genuinely-confusing from the merely above-their-level. (After all, for someone to reliably predict how an expert would react in a situation, they must be able to apply the knowledge and experience of an expert. If someone were to say: "well, if I knew more than I know now, I would think X; but at my actual current knowledge level, I think Y"... that person would sound very confused.) You refer to yourself as a newbie. And you have repeatedly said that for something to be IEEE-ese, it must be confusing not just to newcomers, but confusing to experts. And so I ask: given that you are not an expert, what makes you think you can tell the difference between IEEE-ese and and something that merely happens to confuse you? How do you distinguish the genuinely-confusing from the above-your-level, given that you admit to not having reached expert level? If you say that the documentation is confusing to you, I will accept this without question; you are probably the world's leading expert on what is confusing to you, and I have no reason to disbelieve you. If you say that the documentation is confusing to other newcomers, I may be inclined to trust your judgment. But you repeatedly accuse the Raku documentation of being confusing to experts. (You accuse it of being IEEE-ese, and you define IEEE-ese as confusing to experts.) I do not trust your judgment on that matter. If you think I should, I invite you to say why. Do you see ANYONE on this mailing list, other than > me asking how to untangle "method contains(Cool:D: |c)", > even though they are "cleanly and precisely" done? > (Well most of the time.) Indeed, I do not. To me, this state of affairs suggests that although the documentation is confusing to you, it is not confusing to others; thus, not IEEE-ese. Perhaps to you, this state of affairs suggests something different. If so, I can't think what that would be.
