Christopher James Huff wrote:
>In article <3f50c242[at]news.povray.org>, Oliver Jaxid <mai### [at] finniqcom>
>wrote:
>
>> but i'am not the only one. minimum 50% of all articles in this group
>> then are beeing wrong placed cause not about pov-source-programming. and
>> this was the ground why i've posted here. so, i think that the names of
>> the groups for pov-news-noobs are a little bit diffuse.
>
>This seems to be true, although I have no idea why. There's *.newusers,

>...

>What makes the names unclear? We have povray.programming, we have
>povray.binaries.programming.

I've been reading these groups since 1999 or so, and sometimes I _still_
forget what "povray.programming" is intended to cover.  Here's why:
POV-Ray has evolved into a pretty serious scripting language.  I would
suspect that very few files use simply the "scene description language" in
a static way.  If only for convenience, most scenes involve algorithmic
structures (loops, conditionals, etc.).  And the use of algorithmic
structures is one of the hallmarks, to very many people, of "programming".

Or, more briefly, many people believe that they are "programming" when they
create a POV-Ray scene.  This group is not about writing programs IN
POV-Ray; it's for discussing the programming that CREATES POV-Ray.  But the
name doesn't make that entirely clear.

As for better names... I'm not sure I have an opinion.  Someone offered
"povray.internals", which seems OK.  Almost any choice of name would at
least avoid this unfortunate conflation of the two senses of "programming"
POV-Ray.


>....

>Particularly, why do new users avoid povray.newusers so thoroughly?

I think a lot of people assume that groups like povray.newusers are created
to quarantine all the newusers so that veterans can more easily avoid them.
 :)  For POV-Ray, this seems an unfair prejudice.

--=================--
The _real_ lesson of John Henry: Never compete with a machine, at the task
for which it was designed...

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