Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 17 December 2014 at 15:01:32 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 December 2014 at 10:16:22 UTC, ketmar via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Dec 2014 18:06:25 +1000
>> Manu via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'd suggest to look at high-quality commercial documentation,
>>> like MSDN or wherever.
>> please, no! the fact that you are used to it doesn't mean that
>> msdn is a quality dox.
>>
> Frankly, I think you're letting your prejudices against the 
> source of the documentation cloud your judgement of the 
> quality.  Much as I hate to admit it, their _reference_ 
> documentation is much more readable at the baseline.

Yep, MSDN is pretty good. I often end up there when other sources 
fail. They are also quite good at documenting what version you 
need to use a feature.

> _less noisy_.  This is what we mean when we talk about 
> "quality" in documentation.  Hell, a lot of CPAN docs are 
> easier to follow than the Phobos stuff, and that's _Perl_ for 
> crissakes!

I'd like to see the phobos documentation in a XML format. That 
would make it a lot easier to parse, analyse and generate 
improved extended documentation.

> aside a chunk of time to "learn" it is really silly.  But it's 
> not as silly as the idea that you don't learn the language by 
> diving in.
>  You know, by using it (and the standard library) to solve a 
> problem?  This is simply how people pick up new programming 
> languages.

Commented code in tutorials and a collection of short idiomatic 
examples + good reference documentation with 
fast-easy-and-precise lookup goes a long way.

> It's more akin to the Haskell reaction: "This seems neat, but 
> it's asking way too much of me and I don't have time for it."

Yep, that is how I felt about Haskell when using the interpreter 
many years ago, but this:

https://tryhaskell.org/

is enough to get me beyond the initial "headache" that the 
weirder aspects of Haskell may cause (such as the function 
signatures).

Such interactive walk-throughs of the basics are really useful if 
you want to ease the learning curve in a fun way.