Hello Wow full moon this month really got Edu-Sig whipped up... And I am feeling somehwere between fascinated and horrified at this discussion, but can't resist adding 0.2 myself, Thanks maybe to two items I read this morning:
Unsentimental Education www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/hitchens <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/hitchens> <quote> It is only toward the very end of the memoir that Hughes utters the line that furnishes the title. "By now," he says, "I realized that my main impulse for writing a book was to force myself to find out about things I didn't know." This could be said by or about almost any author--"the educator must be educated," as Marx put it, and no serious person is not self-taught--but it would be as true to say of Hughes that he came to find out things that he knew already. </quote> ....................................... Anthropomorphic REBOL http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/blog.r?view=0294#comments <quote> At times in discussions, documentation, or error messages, REBOL may be treated as a living entity. It's not done that often, but some users find it annoying. I remember that it was annoying in the Logo programming language. If you typed "foo", the system would respond: I don't know how to foo REBOL does not go that far. On the other hand, some users find a degree of anthropomorphism to be useful. It gives them another "mind tool" to help them program REBOL. For example, in R2.0: >> insert 1 ** Script Error: insert expected series argument of type: series port bitset This wording was intentional. I selected that message because it put the most important element, the function name, first. However, that does make it sound a bit anthropomorphic. Just a bit. As an experiment, in R3.0, I changed the error to: >> insert 1 ** Script Error: integer not allowed as the series argument of insert Is that error more clear? Here the offending datatype gets first position, and the function gets the tail. </Quote> ---------------- That was a post by REBOL's prime creator Carl Sassenrath on his blog as he works towards REBOL3, a better brighter major rewrite which threatens to maybe also break some legacy code. Sound familiar? Actionscript3 under Adobe's tree now, is doing that too, though REBOL is famously short and compact compared to the galactic scaled resources and libraries of Java, Python etc Anyway, in reply there swiftly emerged consensus among experienced REBOL programmers that they like the current [old] error more friendly one better. Among those comments was this gem: <quote> *Brian Wisti: *I share Henrik's opinion that the "not allowed" error message is not as clear as the "expected" message. Both tell me I'm using the wrong type, but the "expected" message gives me a full summary of what types I can use. But really, so long as you never get anything like Python's "Syntax Error: Invalid Syntax", I will be pretty content. </quote> --------------- I read recently that Lao-Tse thought XML was verbose but that did not matter because computers will someday learn from poets. Jason _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
