On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Stefan <stefanvanz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 2:12:43 PM UTC-6, Nathann Cohen wrote: >> >> Hello Jori, >> >> We should of course state such things as clearly as possible in the >> doc, that's an mandatory step. >> >> In some cases, however, the users call functions without knowing >> (subfunction of other things), or just won't look at the doc, or just >> won't even profile the code (not everybody knows how) and 'just wait'. >> >> Somehow, we already have documentation for those who know what they >> are looking for, and know where to look for it. But some people could >> be surprised to learn that a function can use different >> libraries/algorithms, and those are the guys I would like to inform. >> >> If we can find a nice way to do that. >> >> Nathann > > > It's easy to go overboard with holding the user by the hand. We can assume > that when things get _too_ slow for a user, he or she will start looking for > a speedup, which they might find inside SageMath, or elsewhere. We give them > the tools, we give them the documentation; how they use that is up to them. > We're already holding our students by the hand way too much with > participation credit, quizzes, graded homework and midterm exams. Let's not > start holding our end users by the hand too, and focus instead to have the > best possible software with the best possible interface and the best > possible documentation.
To contrast with your discouragement, I'm *for* innovate ways of adding such additional hand holding like Nathann suggests. I think this is exactly the sort of creative thinking we need to act on in order to increase the value that Sage provides. I've also thought recently about adding functionality sort of like this, based possibly on an automated analysis of how people actually use Sage (on SageMathCloud). Considered more broadly, Nathann's suggestions is kind of like the spell checker in google searches. Instead of just showing a big error on certain common input, or just running stupidly slowly, let's tell the user what they probably really want to do. -- William -- William (http://wstein.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
