On 2021-10-19 23:36, Duke Normandin wrote:
But it doesn't have to be a mere summary! It could be the whole-meal-deal - one point at a time! And it could be expanded for more advanced features!
That doesn't really seem to be the approach taken in any of the documents I've looked at (nor does the website's tagline suggest that's the purpose). It also seemed to me that the format becomes hard to follow for some of the longer documents (such as Java).
But that's just one person's opinion.
Because it could be a community effort, there would be no need to wait for yet another book(s), or blog(s) to be written as time permitted. The initial time and effort would certainly be non-trivial, but IMO it's absolutely necessary to spread the use and usefulness of Pike. Unless the few core developers would rather the language remain a close-door, private project. In which case the public should not be exposed to the language at all.
I don't think that the core developers have an opinion one way or the other about it, and it wouldn't really matter if they did: It's simply a matter of someone dedicating time to the task.
> It would not do your book project much good though. IMHO, Pike and its quality capabilities are freely available and so should quality documentation and tutorials for it.
To be clear, it's not "my" book, it was produced with a lot of help from the community (as it says on the cover). Some people just prefer that format and those sorts of efforts aren't mutually exclusive.
The https://learnxinyminutes.com site seems to be the quickest way to get there. A link to it on Pike's homepage would be all that is required and newcomers to Pike would be spared the hunt-n-peck search for a complete up-to-date set of docs.
The existing tutorial and manual are competently written documents. If it were me spending the time to solve the problem of having material for a new user learning the language, I would complete it's conversion to the new website format rather than starting a totally new effort. After that, I'd probably consider what needed to be added from newer releases of Pike. Obviously that's just my opinion, but the delta between it and the new items that ought to be covered in it are fairly small.
Anyway, this Pike noob won't probably ever see that happen. I first looked at Pike 10 or so years ago, and like I said previously nothing about the documentation has changed much during that period. There must be a reason for that! Of course, maybe you guys want it that way - a closed shop!
Having met pretty much everyone involved, I can say for certain that no one intends the situation to be hostile to new users. It's simply a matter of everyone being busy working on the code. If someone were to come along and start an effort such as you're describing, I have no doubt that folks here would be supportive.
It is certainly a problem that the tutorial on the Pike website is incomplete, but you never said what you thought was deficient about the complete document?
http://web.archive.org/web/20160305143752/http://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/tutorial/ and http://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/
Good luck! -- Duke
