On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> There is a law obeyed by newsgroups, which seems to be
> respected here: the most trivial problem, when presented in
> a provocative sauce focuses the attention of so many people,
> that the issue becomes disturbing.
>
Several problems seem to percolate through the discussion
in the "How to cat" thread.
+ Friedrich raises few valid questions and he - hopefully -
does not want to go away. That has forced some respondents
to come up with really good and clear definitions. Good!
What would be a better way of inventing clear answers
than to carefully listen to simple questions in the first
place? (My bow to Hannah here, who first said that.)
But the answers are more interesting than the questions
(for many listeners here) posed. Which is fine.
+ We need a good FAQ. So good that excuses like
"RYFM" (Read Your F.. Manual) won't be needed any longer.
I say "excuses", because such phrase is often
immaterial due to a poor quality of many such documents
anyway.
I do not mean "Frequently Asked Trivial Questions".
I mean "Not-Necesserily-Frequently Asked but Basic Questions."
+ Abbreviations are bad, unless always defined nearby.
(By the way, Hannah defined HOF acronym in one of her
early posts. Friedrich just missed it.)
+ Long threads need to be summarized somehow. Otherwise
they seem like noise. But, as you said, they carry
some disturbing message. In this case: Haskell community
has not provided clear and simple definitions accessible
to newcomers. Bear in mind that a newcomer does not
necessary mean a beginner programmer. It might mean
an expert in Quantum Electrodynamics - possibly Nobel
Prize candidate, who just wonders whether s/he could
use Haskell for tasks on hand. (See my Post Script)
+ We do not want to be a hermetic society, do we?
Guarded by acronyms, lack of clear glossaries and
lack of clear explanations of basic concepts? "If I cannot
explain this to 12 year old, than I surely do not
understand it myself" (I do not remember who said
this, and this "quote" is my free interpolation
of the original.)
Oh, I know that there is plenty of a good introductory
material available on the net. But how about exposing it
better somehow?
+ John Peterson promised to provide a framework for
this sort of things. But surely we cannot expect
him to tackle the entire content himself. This would be
a big project - worthy an effort of many people.
Just ask Simon Peyton-Jones what sort of effort he
(and others) put into Haskell reports.
Jan
P.S.
Example of clarity in Science:
My background is in Rational Mechanics (a branch of
Mathematical Physics). The tradition there was such
that any new paper was always very clearly defined.
All definitions, acronyms and concepts were always
clearly exposed in introductory section of _any_ paper.
Truesdell's 3-volumes Springer-Verlag's edition
of Rational Mechanics (in the series of "Handbook of Physics",
where Pauli and Heisenberg previously wrote their volumes
on Quantum Mechanics) was written with all known alphabets -
Russian and Gothic font included. He simply run out of unique
symbols provided by Latin.
But the end result was very clear. I wish such approach
was more popular in other branches of science. Any
newcomer, with reasonable generic background in physics
or engineering, could read and understand his books.
But try to read papers on Particle Physics without
ardous previous investigation. The acronyms would
kill you at once.
