Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 17 December 2014 at 20:16, ketmar via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> 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.
>
> besides, msdn references are exactly what phobos documentation is:
> description of functions. will msdn reference dox help you to learn
> msvc? yet you citing it as "high-quality" and blaming phobos dox for
> doing (or, rather, not doing) the same.

I was referring mostly to the organisation, which never assaults you
with a wall of text.
It's categorised nicely, and content is fetched dynamically.

That said, I would say MSDN is a good technical reference; short,
concise, well formatted, easy to understand. Phobos is not that.
In some cases, Phobos it's so 'concise' that the entire doc is 3 or 4
words repeating the function name but with spaces, and in other cases
it is a wall of text, with a bunch of cryptic template args and
constraints.

>> One thing I know for sure, is when they are confronted with
>> constraints, especially on templates, they have absolutely no idea
>> what they're looking at...
> did they ever tried to learn the language? seems that you just throwed
> phobos dox at them and expecting them to use that dox to learn D.

I never threw phobos docs at them, they found that themselves. I was
actually kinda trying to steer them away from those docs in some
cases, by insisting they hack on the code while I was in the room...


> D is not C. D is not C++. one must learn it before using it. and phobos
> documentation is not for learning the language, it's reference for
> phobos.

I can safely say I never 'learned D' by your definition.
I brute forced my way with nothing more than the phobos reference, and
the parallel language reference.

A senior C/C++ programmer should DEFINITELY be able to learn D by osmosis.


> i bet the story was like this: "guys, look at this cool language, it's
> almost like C++, and has some great features! let's use it!" "ah,
> almost like C++? so we don't have to learn? great, let's do it! but...
> hey... what do all that gibberish in documentation mean? i've never
> seen that is C++... screw it, this wannabe C++ language is awful!"

Don't be insulting.
C++ programmers know exactly how bad C++ is. We've been discussing D's
alternative approaches to common C++ problems for months, many hours
wasted in front of the white board discussing the differences between
the languages.
They had a *lot* of background conversation to work with, much more
than I had when I learned D.