Weekly Edition
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Distribution quote of the week
If you're wondering why people don't follow your instructions to help you
with your project, go hit your local library and check out a cookbook. Bake
something you've never baked before. Then, while eating it, open your
documentation again and take a look at it with this in mind.
-- Mel
Chua from her FUDCon lightning talk(Log in to post comments)
Actually cookbook will show you that you are doing everything right Posted Feb 3, 2011 21:46 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Heh. The problem here is the fact that both cookbooks and most project's documentations assume we are dealing with knowleadgeable person. The simplest question may be problematic. What does "salt and pepper to taste" mean? How will you know if it's too much or not enough if you don't have experience? The same is true with most packages: they assume certain level of knowleadge - but unlike cooking which is done by billions (so cookbook author knows roughly where reader comes from) computer knowleadge veries wildly from person to person. Some packages documentation is just horrible, of course - but I'm not sure it's the main problem.
Actually cookbook will show you that you are doing everything right Posted Feb 5, 2011 5:57 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
I seem to remember a documentary about cooking and when mass printed cook-books came out, chef's called them out as "breaking trade secrets", "killing the culture of cooking", "dumbing down the kitchen", etc. While there had been cook books for years, they were for haute cuisine and supposedly "trade secrets" for restaurants.
And while they do have terms like "season to taste", I have actually seen several that explained what that meant (sort of like obscure flags in gcc that work well for X box but not Y).
My mistake Posted Feb 5, 2011 8:12 UTC (Sat) by jajpol (subscriber, #8044) [Link]
For a moment I read Mel Chua as Mea Culpa
Interesting Posted Feb 10, 2011 9:52 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
IMHO this presentation is an interesting analogy which is worthwile to read.
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