Another Morphic Tutorial

Dan Shafer dshafer at yahoo.com
Thu Apr 19 06:39:02 UTC 2001


Thanks, Richard. Another good argument for staying with what we have.

I've changed my Counter tutorial to match this terminology and I'll stay with
it through the rest of my work.

--- "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> 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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