On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 9:12 PM Jeremy Monat <jemo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Aaron,
>
> Thanks. Great--the new documentation homepage is much clearer with its 
> division into 1) Tutorials, 2) How-to Guides, 3) Explanation, and 4) API 
> Reference. With the old documentation, my mental model of the content 
> categorization was just 1) tutorial and 2) technical documentation. That's 
> why I thought anything along the lines of a guide belonged in the tutorial.
>
> Diataxis Framework Categorization
> Having those four categories also helpfully highlights the lack of guides. 
> Currently, the top-level guides are only Getting Started, Contributing to 
> SymPy, Assumptions, and Symbolic and fuzzy booleans. Having a roadmap for 
> which guides we'd like to add would be helpful so whoever is available and 
> interested could start building a guide, e.g.
>
> we've already identified solvers, parsing solved equations, and parsing 
> expressions
> it would be helpful to have a guide explaining what kinds of things you can 
> do with SymPy (Calculus, Linear Algebra, etc.), as the wiki tutorial nicely 
> does

That's why guides are the main focus of my project.

As for a roadmap, my plan is to use a combination of issues, questions
here on the mailing list and in other places like StackOverflow, and a
user survey which is currently running (at
https://forms.gle/EjkFEdnLXaYxjvfn6 for anyone who hasn't yet taken
it) to get a better idea of our documentation needs. I haven't yet
worked out how I want to keep track of this stuff. Most likely I will
have a tracking issue, but I may also end up using something more
dynamic to take notes for myself on what I see that needs documenting.

>
> It's good that the breadcrumbs at the top of each new page indicate which 
> category the page is in, e.g. SymPy 1.10.dev documentation » Explanation » 
> Gotchas and Pitfalls for 
> https://docs.sympy.org/dev/explanation/gotchas.html#equals-signs. Displaying 
> the category even more prominently might be helpful.
>
> Tutorial "What's next"
> Typically, when I want to use a new package, I do the tutorial, then (unless 
> otherwise directed) figure I'm on my own, so I search for my topic of 
> interest. (Perhaps the documentation site admins can provide quantitative 
> data about navigation patterns of new users.) The new tutorial simply ends 
> without suggesting where learners might want to go next. So it'd be helpful 
> to add a "What's next" page at the end of the tutorial pointing learners to 
> the guides--that seems like the most likely section they'd want, to learn 
> more about any particular topic they came to SymPy to use.

That's a good idea.

Aaron Meurer

>
> My next step
> I'll identify a first issue and create it in the tracker.
>
> Jeremy
>
> On Tuesday, November 30, 2021 at 11:21:57 PM UTC-5 asme...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 9:00 PM Jeremy Monat <jem...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Oscar, thanks for the information about SymPy's capabilities and options.
>> >
>> > Because many of the pages we're discussing are in the tutorial, I think it 
>> > would be useful to lay out the current and proposed tutorial structure in 
>> > a document. I created a page on the wiki Tutorial structure on 
>> > docs.sympy.org. I started by pasting in the current tutorial structure (at 
>> > the page and topic levels), and suggest we collaboratively develop a 
>> > proposed structure.
>> >
>> > If there is a better medium, or someone else (e.g. Aaron Meurer) already 
>> > has something in the works, please let me know.
>>
>> Let's use the issue tracker for this. I'm still trying to figure out
>> in general how I plan to organize my documentation ideas.
>>
>> There are a few things here. First, regarding the "tutorial", I think
>> we shouldn't be misled. Currently the pages that exist are in the
>> tutorial, but that doesn't mean all pages should go in the tutorial.
>> We have recently made a new organization for our documentation, which
>> can be viewed at https://docs.sympy.org/dev/index.html. This is based
>> on the Diataxis Framework https://diataxis.fr/. Sections should go in
>> the place that make the most sense. I expect a large part of what we
>> are talking about will not be tutorial, but either explanation of
>> how-to guides (the recorded talk on the Diataxis page gives the best
>> explanation of the differences between these). In particular, the
>> current "tutorial" is actually an "introductory tutorial". It should
>> not really be expanded much, unless the material really is relevant
>> for a very first time user of SymPy.
>>
>> For solvers, there is a lot of stuff that needs better documentation.
>> A big problem also is that the current API of the solvers is itself a
>> bit of a mess, which makes it harder to document the "best practices".
>> I think what we should do for solvers is to break it down into smaller
>> pieces, which can be documented separately. Just as an initial idea, I
>> think we could use a top-level tutorial on intro to solving (which
>> already partly exists in the existing tutorial) that just goes over
>> the very basics and does things like stress the differences between
>> symbolic and numeric solutions. Then we can have several how-to guides
>> on different types of problems that might come up relating to solving,
>> like solving inequalities, finding roots of polynomials, and
>> manipulating the output of solve() and solveset(). There is also this
>> existing documentation on solveset that goes over the high-level
>> design, https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/solvers/solveset.html,
>> which mostly fits in the "explanation" Diataxis category.
>>
>> Aaron Meurer
>>
>> >
>> > Jeremy
>> > On Tuesday, November 30, 2021 at 11:35:15 AM UTC-5 da...@dbailey.co.uk 
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Thanks for responding,
>> >>
>> >> On 29/11/2021 18:51, Aaron Meurer wrote:
>> >> > Can you clarify what you mean by "3.4.6"? This is the sort of issue I
>> >> > plan on addressing as part of my CZI documentation project.
>> >> >
>> >> Yes, sorry I was referring to the section
>> >>
>> >> 3.4.6 Sqrt is not a Function
>> >>
>> >> in the PDF version of the 1.8 documentation (I guess the numbers
>> >> probably change from version to version - so I should have used 1.9.
>> >>
>> >> David
>> >>
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