On 15/04/2011 04:51 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/15/2011 3:55, Invisible wrote:
>> In short, almost nothing is documented. I find this extremely
>> frustrating.
>
> It is all documented. It's just not documented in a place that it's easy
> for non-programmers to get to. Do you have an MSDN subscription, for
> example?
>
> Basically, documentation of this type costs extra. :-)

So I paid money for some software, but I need to pay more money to find 
out how to actually use it? WTF?

I find it really bizarre that if I want to look up the name of the Win32 
function call to open a new window, that's free, but if I want to find 
out what a particular configuration setting for MS Word does, I have to 
pay money for that. [Or at least, that's what your post implies. I'm not 
aware of this information being available *anywhere*, paid or not.]

>> When you *buy* an expensive commercial product, you expect better than
>> this. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't.
>
> Yes, that's really my gripe. I'd be happy to pay $100 for a program I
> can get free elsewhere if it comes with good documentation. I'm still
> pissed that I bought a $300 modeler and they sent me the documentation
> from the version two generations back because they hadn't sold as many
> copies of the software as they expected and printed too many manuals 3
> years ago.

It's annoying when freebie stuff isn't very well tested, or doesn't do 
what the documentation says it does, or there's just no documentation. 
But when you pay money for it (and MS products are insanely expensive), 
you don't expect this kind of nonesense.

> The other problem is people are starting to write test-driven-design
> style documentation for products that have APIs. And that's just the
> *wrong* way to do things.

This is so very, very wrong.

> Documentation by hypothesis and induction. The whole coding exercise
> turns into one giant cargo cult exercise. "I have to put this here and
> that there, because that's what the people before me did. I don't know
> why, but if I don't do what they did, the cargo won't come."

So wrong.

> </rant>
>
> I feel *much* bettahhhh...

But do you? Do you *really*? You still have to figure this crap out, 
remember? ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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