Kay C Lan wrote:
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
wrote:
What I did say was that it is surprising how people who have been using
LIveCode for a very long time
are still unaware of some ways to do things:
Hmmm, that sounds remarkably like the comment some people make "isn't is
strange how when you're desperately looking for something it's always in
the last place you look". Of course it's in the last place you look! Who
would look any further?
:)
I don't deny LC needs some good reference books, and the Dictionary
certainly needs some attention, but I fail to see any correlation with
those facts and the reality that each LC Guru on this List doesn't
individually know every single in and out of LC. What I do know is that
amongst the collective knowledge of this List I'm astounded at just how
many ways LC can skin a cat; and for this old brain I can typically
remember just one that works for me and the others get lost with yesterdays
news. So whilst Scott says he keeps learning new ways of doing things after
15 years, for me I'd imagine I keep getting surprised about 'new' ways of
doing things, but in reality I've either read it before here on the List or
in the Dictionary, but it just hasn't stuck because I already have a way I
use or it isn't something I need to use to solve a problem right now; so
it's forgetten until I read it anew a couple of years down the track and am
surprised all over again. ;-)
Well said.
A complete overhaul of the documentation is underway right now, which,
in addition to providing a more centralized place to search for relevant
materials, will include a broader search index for the Dictionary, so we
can search for things in the body of the text for a token rather than be
limited to the token itself.
This enhancement will do wonders for moments like this, but it won't
stop us all from benefiting from learning new things now and then.
After all, the engine/language is continually evolving, and there's
always something new to learn.
Consider JavaScript: odds are there are more people typing in the
language in the time it takes me to write this email than the sum of all
xTalkers throughout history combined. Yet where is its single
comprehensive Dictionary? There isn't one. The stewards of the spec,
ECMA, provide scant information about usage. Most usage info is
provided in third-party books, and no single book describes everything
that can be done with JavaScript.
We learn programming languages through reading what we can find,
experimenting, and asking questions in the language's community.
From Pascal through C and C++ to JavaScript, bash, MetaCard and
LiveCode, personally I've found no other way to learn any language.
After all, this moment here is exactly what learning is: it begins with
not knowing something, and ends with knowledge transfer.
At some point or another everyone here who renumbers cards didn't know
how to do it, yet somehow they found the answer. That it wasn't
something that was known in advance isn't a sign that the language or
its documentation is necessarily broken, but simply a reminder that
learning is, by definition, now knowing something in advance.
Relatively little of programming involves typing. Much of it is learning.
While LiveCode has a gentler learning curve than most, we must expect
that some ongoing learning will be part of the process of using it, as
it is with any other richly expressive language.
--
Richard Gaskin
LiveCode Community Manager
rich...@livecode.org
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