Hi,
On 10/27/11 19:48, Edward K. Ream wrote:
[...]
The iPhone parallel doesn't become valid until the gui era.
But we are in the gui era now, and my experience is that the need for
complex docs is a sign of design defects.
The contrary point of view isn't entirely invalid: consider the rst
command. It's powerful because of all the options. Still, I myself
have trouble remembering them all.
The contrary-contrary point of view contrasts rST with LaTeX. Of
course rST is simpler, of course LaTeX is much more flexible. But
that's not the end of the story. My impression is that millenia have
been wasted worrying about stuff that doesn't matter.
So yes, there is a tension. However, I find it difficult to believe
that *nix is a model for any kind of good design :-)
And, contrary to the crowd opinion, I find difficult to believe that Mac
is a model for good design if you want people creating stuff with their
machines instead of consuming it. The videos before the launching of
Iphone were tutorials for it and the key idea is a machine easy to
consume with, not to create with. The moment you want to create is the
moment that you need to deal with details of creation and is also the
moment you will need to deal with documentation, that's why the idea of
Smalltalk about the system being the curricula or Knuth's about code
being the document are so powerful. Sometimes complexity collapses, but
mostly it goes elsewhere, hiding, as someone told me recently. In my
view, having the proper tools to deal with complexity is the key issue
of our times.
Cheers,
Offray
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