> > the comments there, to me, read as hostile to people wanting more docs. > > There is no "anti-more-docs" faction. Not in that thread, or this one. Nobody > will obstruct you from writing docs, nor retaliate if you write docs. Nobody > will be sad if you write docs. You won't see an end-of-year post for 2023, > reporting that more documentation was the worst thing to happen to Nim this > year. Complaints about documentation have ruffled nobody's feathers in that > thread or this one. The thread was not locked because someone tried in it to > improve documentation too hard.
Nowhere did I say there's an "anti-docs" faction, nor do I believe that. In fact, I've said that the only feedback of "write some docs" wasn't my point. I do believe that people are willing to ACCEPT doc requests, I was saying it seems like people don't seem to understand that docs are a barrier to adoption. I would also expect that plenty of people don't want to write docs themselves, when they don't need them. I'm largely the same way. > Is driving more adoption of Nim a meaningful goal? > > Yes. But also, much like "John Funnylastname" has heard your joke about his > name ten thousand times before you said it, so also has every smaller > programming community heard ten thousand times already that a random poster's > pet interest is the only thing standing between their language and greater > popularity. Docs, or being sufficiently nice, or having better support for > this or that specific kind of program. I think it's great that you looked up my last name, but not only do I still personally enjoy the joke, even if I didn't, I would either humor people, or ignore it. I certainly wouldn't try to shame people for having made the joke. Plus, if you did enough research on me, you might have gotten the sense that I'm pretty good at "strategic". And I _was_ trying to have the strategic discussion about what will drive adoption... because I was thinking about whether I could find a way to help advance the things the community thinks is important for adoption. But, I don't see a big sign saying "here's what we think we have to do to drive adoption." I look at the Nim Roadmap, and it's great for me as a technologist, but nothing there seems to be focused on that. > You are the protagonist of your own story, and everything new to you feels to > you like it's new also to the world -- but this comes off as lazy > manipulation. You've written thousands of words in this thread about language > popularity and far fewer words about any documentation improvements that > you'd like to see. I'm sorry you feel that way. It wasn't my intent. But again, I'm not 100% sure "more documentation" is even needed. There are people in the thread suggesting that better aggregation of existing resources is a key bit. Maybe they're right; for me, the docs were mostly fine, and I've said where they weren't. But I ponder the question because "the docs" are a common complaint. Still, since you seem so intent, if I were _just_ thinking about what I'd do on documentation if I had all the dollars in the world, I definitely like seeing more content aggregated and an official wiki (while keeping the reference material easier to access). I'd want to do a BUNCH more HOWTOs and cookbooks. I'd want to see and promote a lot more blog content from the community. > > If so, what are the biggest hurdles? Is there a way to overcome them? > > To wit. Three questions about language popularity. Not documentation. Right. I _was_ interested in driving out the strategy for improving popularity, and documentation seems like it's a piece of the puzzle. > You're so pleased that someone rudely insulted the poster that offended you > by not caring that much about what you had to say. No, I'm not pleased at all. If anything, I'm disappointed at what I perceive as a general lack of professionalism, and certainly of friendliness. > Do you think that these questions should be printed on gold leaf? Is it > really wrong for someone to get testy, at this point? In my view, absolutely. I have been in the situation many times, and I would absolutely be embarrassed to find any situation where I was a leader in a community, trying to act in a way that discouraged people who wanted to be involved, and participate in that community, especially when done with even an ounce of derision. In my view the professional thing to do, as per above with your point about my name, is to either just ignore the thread, or to just give a polite but terse answer based on past experience, and move on with my day. > The biggest hurdle to Nim's popularity is that more people don't write more > interesting things in Nim, that other people would like to use or support. > There are lots of individual reasons for that, and I'll easily accept that > "bad documentation" describes some of those individuals' reasons. For my > part, prior bad presentation of documentation has given me the worry that > nobody's taking documentation seriously, and "nobody's taking documentation > seriously" is a feeling that a language doesn't have a future, which > discourages my writing software in that language. The documentation > presentation's gotten better; on the other hand, I find > <https://nim-lang.org/> less useful because I have to scroll past a bunch of > tutorials to find the manual/lib/tools references that are always what I'm > going there for. Now that's something I agree with, and I would have loved to have had the discussion on what it would take to get more interesting software built in Nim.
