On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Julius Guzy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, there is a problems with the documentation and if it does not get > resolved then people will end up unable to write the code. I mean what is > the point in loosing people who actually want to program this machine and > are willing to put oodles of effort into doing it?
There's been a lot of discussion on the list lately about how Cocoa has been so hard for people to learn, but not a lot of useful specifics or follow-up. People haven said "the API is bad because it refers to all these terms you're already supposed to know and I don't know them!", and then when someone says "Did you read the conceptual documentation?" the response is a resounding... silence. I think this is part of why those veteran Cocoa developers are often less than sympathetic. You say it's the most difficult piece of learning you've done in your life, but I wonder how you went about it. It may be that the problem is not so much in the documentation itself, as in the "meta-documentation" - that is, guiding newbies to the appropriate documentation in the appropriate order. Unfortunately, that can of course be frustrated by the types who jump right in and start reading APIs with abandon and then complain that they don't understand certain terminology or concepts. (Not that I'm accusing you in particular of doing this, your comment just happened to spark this response). So, it'd be interesting to hear from people what they actually *tried* with respect to learning from the documentation and why it failed. Clearly the documentation worked for a large percentage of the veteran developers on the list - personally, I own one Cocoa book, and I think I made it through about a quarter of it before giving it up as useless because the API was well written and conceptual documentation covered the questions that arose. I wonder if this has more to do with a difference in approach to the documentation than anything else. -- - David T. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
