Another Morphic Tutorial
Richard A. O'Keefe
ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Thu Apr 19 03:04:06 UTC 2001
Dan Shafer <dshafer at yahoo.com> asked:
How important is it, Alan, for those of us writing tutorials and other docs to
use this same terminology, in your view? I mean, is this really important stuff
that has a lot of thought behind it that we shouldn't disturb or should we feel
free to re-think it?
Can I answer this from the perspective of someone who needs to *read*
the tutorials, and couldn't possibly write them (yet)?
When I use Squeak, I seem to spend a *lot* of time browsing around the
system, using Cmd-f in a browser or bringing up a method finder or whatever.
Suppose for argument's sake that someone decided that
halo => necklace
handle => bead
would be a better set of names. Come to think of it, I rather like them.
Next a student works with a tutorial for a bit, and then starts to wonder how
it all works and what they can steal. (Smalltalk is *supposed* to be like
that!) So they bring up a method finder and look for "necklace".
'necklace' leads to nothing
'bead' leads to maybeAddCollapseItemTo:
When the student *does* eventually stumble on 'halo', they're going to
have to keep *two* sets of names in their heads, the names used in the
tutorials and the names actually used in the system they are exploring.
Writing a tutorial for Squeak is different from writing a tutorial for
Microsoft Word, because it is legal, moral, and entirely non-fattening
to look at the code. Every technical term has to serve *two* purposes
in a tutorial: helping people to understand the concept, and helping
them to find the code and use it.
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