Re: Assertions in Mathematica?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg113516] Re: Assertions in Mathematica?
- From: "E. Martin-Serrano" <eMartinSerrano at telefonica.net>
- Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 04:58:53 -0500 (EST)
Hi, Besides, there is an unavoidable psychological inclination for writers to project, over the writings they produce, what they (the writers) have in their own minds; without, in fact, putting it on paper however they believe that they do it. In other words, they do not write what they think they have actually written: this is so because they, unconsciously, think/sense that the lacking part is something 'obvious' and it is implicit in the text; or, otherwise, it should be known by the intended readers. The result is that many users/readers are doomed to spend, in this case, at least, 50% of their time looking for non existing explanations. However, when the writers read what they wrote, they actually perceive that they wrote what they actually did not. And that is the source of the problem. IMHO" E. Martin-Serrano -----Original Message----- From: Nasser M. Abbasi [mailto:nma at 12000.org] Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 11:37 AM To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net Subject: [mg113516] [mg113513] Re: Assertions in Mathematica? On 10/31/2010 12:10 AM, kj wrote: ... Can I also join in the rant about the documentations? :) What I like to see more in documentations: 1. more examples, and more examples, and yet more examples. 2. more description, do not be too terse. Many times, a command will show one small example, and its output, with little words or description to help someone to understand it. Also, Documentation should have more tutorials showing how to combine many commands together. I also think the documentation should be written not by the developers themselves, but by non-programmers. Because if the programmer writes the documentation of the software they know, they think something is 'obvious', and so they will short change the documentation. I think the Mathematica documentation seems to be written by the same engineers who work on Mathematica itself, and these are very smart developers to start with, and they think every one is at their level of knowledge of Mathematica (subconsciously), so they might not describe the command fully. So please add more examples and more details to the documentations. More is always better when it comes to help pages. Do not be like the unix man pages ;) > > ~kj > --Nasser