On May 22, 2008, at 7:46 AM, Jeff LaMarche wrote:
On May 21, 2008, at 9:58 PM, Andy Lee wrote:
There's already an inherent lower bound on the barrier to entry for
Cocoa. You have to understand certain fundamentals -- some
conceptual, some procedural. If you don't have those fundamentals,
you'll never make Cocoa work. There is also a set of people on
this planet who are trying to grasp those fundamentals and are
perfectly capable of doing so. To argue that it's better for the
platform if those people take a little longer to become proficient
at Cocoa seems to me a bit odd.
I'm not entirely sure that's exactly what is being argued, but even
if it is, "weird" opinions can be perfectly valid. Graham stated
what he intended in his recent e-mail better than I can, so there's
no point in me re-hashing it.
Suffice it to say, I think there is some merit to this "weird" idea
that you should learn the culture and the conceptual underpinnings
in addition to the syntax of the language and names of classes and
methods if you want to succeed
I agree with this last sentence and I didn't mean to call this idea
weird.
I think we have a disconnect as to what you meant by "lowering the
barriers" -- hence my reference to that particular phrase.
(and that takes time, no matter how good the documentation).
That's right. Improving documentation, publishing third-party books,
offering courses, etc. can only lower the barriers so far. The only
way to lower them any further would be to radically change the
frameworks and APIs themselves, and I don't think anybody was asking
for that. The vast majority of this thread, if not all of it, has
been about people struggling to understand the frameworks as they are.
If these people need to RTFM, that's one thing. But if there are
barriers we can lower, *short* of dumbing down and idiot-proofing the
frameworks and APIs themselves, I think it's good for the platform to
do so.
The Mac market is different and has different expectations, and much
of those expectations exist because developers (by and large) do
read and understand the conceptual docs and conform to a set of
conventions gleaned from them unless there's a compelling reason not
to.
Many of those expectations existed before there was Cocoa, before
there was NextStep, at a time when the conceptual barriers to entry
were much lower. I would guess that a lot of credit goes to the
existence and adoption of the HIG, at least as much as the API
documentation. Most of this thread, if not all, has NOT been about
people failing to read the HIG.
The people who don't read the conceptual docs or understand them (yet)
are not going to flood the market with crappy Mac software, because
their apps aren't going to work. If there's a threat at all, it's
from the people who know how to write Cocoa apps, but not write *good*
Cocoa apps. I don't think the answer to that is barriers; I hold out
hope that the expectations of the market would weed out the crappy
stuff. But as you say, it's okay to disagree.
--Andy
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