> ... don't make the mistake of thinking Techspeak is anything like
> Programmerese,
Not identical but similar, the are both languages that may be
unintelligible to the uninitiated. My point wasn't that they
had any similarity to each other but that both are dissimilar
from ordinary English.
As long as we are talking about language, I have for some time
said that programmers should never write documentation, assuming
that they do write them now. The programmer could make a list
of what the program can do and someone who doesn't know how to do
those things should have the programmer show them, then they
should write the docs. The programmers don''t seem to have a clue
as to what a newbie needs to know to use programs.
Then of course there's another problem with docs. They are
written usually in a kind of linear manner, to learn anything
you almost have to read everything. I don't want to learn how
to make a clock, I just want to know what time it is.
What I want my docs to do is to list the features, then show
the steps to use that feature. When I look for how to do
various things and I scan the Inded and Table of contents,
even on line docs where you can scan for words, sometimes
key words don't show up in the scan.
> Now you know where they got the whole file compression idea from.
Yes, I suppose some documentation does seem to be geared to short
words, or at least the terms may be. But of course the need for such
truncation is no longer as necessary as it used to be.
Speaking of that, it makes me think of my CBM computer. Before
DOS and it's eight + three, CBM file names could be 16 characters
long and did not need extensions. I personally prefer extensions,
I want to know what a file is for. .exe or .com or .bat tell me that
the file is executable. etc. It makes me wonder how an OS that
doesn't need extensions knows what to do with a file. {-(
Thanks for the reply,
Jim
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