And I don't mean, oh, hey, you can code some, I mean, you know what object oriented programming is, what a static typed language is, what's a shallow copy of an array, you're learn several programming languages and know or can deduce what's behind the handwaving.
Yeah, that's me, and I'm pretty sure that you're right about it being targeted to people like me. What I did when I wanted to start playing with S2 was sit down, read the manual from the first section through to the last section, and then bookmark the Core Layer 1 appendix for reference. It was an "I want to learn this new programming language" approach, and I know a lot of people have an "I want to produce a style" approach instead and were frustrated as all get out over documentation that was completely not written for that kind of quick language reference. But, having seen that frustration, I somewhat selfishly don't want to flip it around and leave my kind of programmers just as frustrated by the next cycle of documentation.... And I don't think that it would have to, of course: there's a lot of really good technical writing out there that can please -- well, most of the people most of the time, at least!
I'm going to try and think about what made the S2 language particularly easy for me to learn from the old documentation and think about ways in which that can be made a part of the new documentation. I haven't paid much attention to the beginner documentation, because that's not what I needed, but I would like to go back through some of the old lj style comms from the time that S2 was first introduced and see what some of the more common questions and gotchas were for the other programmers learning the language, and see if those can be included in the new manual as well.
no subject
Yeah, that's me, and I'm pretty sure that you're right about it being targeted to people like me. What I did when I wanted to start playing with S2 was sit down, read the manual from the first section through to the last section, and then bookmark the Core Layer 1 appendix for reference. It was an "I want to learn this new programming language" approach, and I know a lot of people have an "I want to produce a style" approach instead and were frustrated as all get out over documentation that was completely not written for that kind of quick language reference. But, having seen that frustration, I somewhat selfishly don't want to flip it around and leave my kind of programmers just as frustrated by the next cycle of documentation.... And I don't think that it would have to, of course: there's a lot of really good technical writing out there that can please -- well, most of the people most of the time, at least!
I'm going to try and think about what made the S2 language particularly easy for me to learn from the old documentation and think about ways in which that can be made a part of the new documentation. I haven't paid much attention to the beginner documentation, because that's not what I needed, but I would like to go back through some of the old lj style comms from the time that S2 was first introduced and see what some of the more common questions and gotchas were for the other programmers learning the language, and see if those can be included in the new manual as well.