στις 27/05/2010 13:02, O/H Viktor Szakáts έγραψε:
To Pete,
[ Sorry to reply here, but I'm readonly user of users-list. ]
Strange and insulting thoughts towards anyone who have
dedicated huge amount (many years) of (maybe even full
time) to take this project where it is now. Maybe
you could elaborate on what you mean by "documentation
friendly code"...
If coding means nothing to you, pls delete all the
Harbour sources and try to use it after...
Viktor,
[I finally managed to discover that my post in users-forum had been
replied here. so, here it is my humble yet belated answer]
are you sure you have understood my words? I 'm afraid you don't!
What I am not sure for, is the reason for this misunderstanding.
Perhaps, is it due to my bad English or what?
And how did you find "insulting" thoughts, there where it doesn't exist?
When I am saying documentation is more valuable than coding, in no way
mean that "coding is nothing".
It just means that without documentation, many parts of code is almost
unusable, for many people (users).
We all agree with you that if every individual harbour user would be
willing to write some (small) part of documentation, the Harbour manual
would perhaps be already here. But life has shown that it is not that
simple. Months ago we have had the very same discussion. many people had
then declared their interest to contribute, some of them had shown their
valuable ideas and had made specific proposals. Unfortunately after a
while the interest had faded out, and the only "real" remained/result
was an documenting extension into hbide, which supposedly would help to
write documentation. I have tried to use it. It didn't work (not in
operational meaning of the term). Beyond this, i 've had spent hours
digging into sources, trying to format some pieces of documentation. the
results were not significant. why? because writing documentation is
indeed difficult, actually is more difficult than somebody can imagine
and for sure more difficult than coding. that's why, i suppose, for
every thousands good coders correspond few -very few or even none- good
documenters.
Regarding your definition of idealism, i couldn't put it better.
"thinking, learning, contributing and/or paying" is the only realistic
approach.
Starting from the later, please don't have any doubt that I (and I
believe many other Harbour users) would be more than willing to _pay_
for a manual if anything did exist. Contributing is another crucial story.
Nobody's _demanding_ anything from developers. And how one could do
that? But asking for documentation should not considered as a demand. Is
a very normal and absolutely expected query for any newcomer to Harbour.
The "do it yourself" is a pushing away answer. What "insulting" do you
find in this paragraph?
By "documentation friendly code" i mean two simple and very well known
things.
a. Short introductory description on top of source code (in place of
this long and more or less useless copyright reminding replica )
b. in-line comments.
c. sample program.
[OK, they are three, but any combination of two will perfectly do the
job ;)]
P.S.: merging harbour-xhb? (wow! this question could be a real
philosophical dilemma). although this is a core-developers decision,
you better don't have doubts that the great majority of the users, in
case they'd been asked for, would loudly vote "No!"
---
Pete
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