Documentation

Andrew C. Greenberg werdna at gate.net
Thu Jun 10 13:07:54 UTC 1999


>Hi people,
>as I was listening to you, while you were speaking about Squeak
>documentation and Squeak books, I said to myself: "why not to tell them
>what I'm missing in Squeak". So...
>I am total newbie in Squeak. Before I became Squeak fan I worked mostly
>with M$ products, like M$ Visual Basic and M$ Visual Studio, so I'm maybe
>very lazy user (in searching "how to do something" things). I like index
>of topics which is used in help files in Wins. When I want to find how
>to do something, first I'm searching for such topic in that list. In 80% I
>find what I want very quickly. This is what I'm missing in the Squeak.
>
>I think taht source code in Squeak is okay, in my opinion it's not really
>necessary to coment all places in Squeak sources. For me it seems to be
>"self commenting" code. But I lose too much time with searching (and
>guessing, where it can be) for some way to do what I want. Reading of some
>book is for me (like for many others) the last way, after few hours spent
>with endless searching for some topic.
>"What class I have to use when I want to do this?",
>"Is this the best way to that?",  "How can I know if this action has any
>side effects I do not know?" are my daily question.
>Okay, someone can say that it's easy to search for some example in Squeak,
>where is used some simillar construction I want to use, but I think that
>surfing in sources is waste of time, isn't it?
>
>The think I'm missing is better just-at-the-time support for me as the
>programmer.

This is interesting, and should be fairly straightforward once the 
Squeak image has, at least, solid class descriptions for all 
important classes.  It should be a simple matter to produce a 
first-cut inverted index and browser/search tool for finding relevant 
classes -- indeed, one could be built that would constantly update 
itself as the image comments change.





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