frankly there are too many random disparate official places with
information about ats. most of the time i cannot find what i want.
even if i know i’ve seen it before. this is, i think, clearly an
impediment to adoption by new people.
also i suspect there isn’t enough documentation. but it is hard to
know what is / not covered because i cannot see the sum total of
documentation easily.
please find a way to coalesce things. this is not just a
nice-to-have if you want it to be more than an academic language.
$0.02
(in particular, i’m just trying to learn about ats/2 templates…)
Brandon Barker
brandon…@gmail.comOn Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 8:41 PM, Raoul Duke rao...@gmail.com wrote:
frankly there are too many random disparate official places with
information about ats. most of the time i cannot find what i want.
even if i know i’ve seen it before. this is, i think, clearly an
impediment to adoption by new people.
also i suspect there isn’t enough documentation. but it is hard to
know what is / not covered because i cannot see the sum total of
documentation easily.
please find a way to coalesce things. this is not just a
nice-to-have if you want it to be more than an academic language.
$0.02
(in particular, i’m just trying to learn about ats/2 templates…)
frankly there are too many random disparate official places with
information about ats. most of the time i cannot find what i want.
even if i know i’ve seen it before. this is, i think, clearly an
impediment to adoption by new people.
For of all, ATS is a very rich and complex language. Documenting it
properly requires a huge effort that is simply beyond what I can do on
my own. I hope that a community of people will find it interesting to
contribute to this effort.
frankly there are too many random disparate official places with
information about ats. most of the time i cannot find what i want.
even if i know i’ve seen it before. this is, i think, clearly an
impediment to adoption by new people.
In particular, I suggest to try the examples in the book by typing in them
one-by-one. In this way, you can get a good feel as to what type-error
messages
look like.
If you want to write code in ATS to solve realistic problems, please first
have a good understanding about the ways in which ATS and C can interact.
Also, feel free to raise questions in this group.On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 8:41:50 PM UTC-4, Raoul Duke wrote:
frankly there are too many random disparate official places with
information about ats. most of the time i cannot find what i want.
even if i know i’ve seen it before. this is, i think, clearly an
impediment to adoption by new people.
also i suspect there isn’t enough documentation. but it is hard to
know what is / not covered because i cannot see the sum total of
documentation easily.
please find a way to coalesce things. this is not just a
nice-to-have if you want it to be more than an academic language.
$0.02
(in particular, i’m just trying to learn about ats/2 templates…)
everybody is missing the point / i did a bad job making my point. apologies.
i do not just want new pointers to things: i desire for the current
mish-mash to be cleaned up so that people never have to ask such
questions because they managed to find things relatively quickly and
easily on their own.
somebody who doesn’t know ats or who is trying to find specific docs
(e.g. i still haven’t found anything sufficient about templates!?!!!)
ends up with google search results that are just all over the place -
many different domains have stuff from the author of ATS himself, let
alone all the other (2 or 3) places that are do-gooders trying to blog
/ document more stuff about the language.
so basically there is no way to win: the official docs seem to not
help, and google searching just makes it look like everything is a
mess.
this is not the kind of user experience that will really help draw in new users.
i urge people who have control of the ‘official’ stuff that is out
there to do things to rectify this if they actually want the
language to gain traction. i mean, i’m offering this advice for free
or you can go pay $$$ to some web marketing genius to get similar
comments (but only if they are actually good).
[all this can probably done in the course of a week at least as a
quick and dirty first pass of coalescing things. heck you might be
able to get a Technical Writer / SEO type undergraduate to do this
work in exchange for some credit, no?]
Brandon Barker
brandon…@gmail.comOn Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 2:22 PM, Raoul Duke rao...@gmail.com wrote:
everybody is missing the point / i did a bad job making my point.
apologies.
i do not just want new pointers to things: i desire for the current
mish-mash to be cleaned up so that people never have to ask such
questions because they managed to find things relatively quickly and
easily on their own.
somebody who doesn’t know ats or who is trying to find specific docs
(e.g. i still haven’t found anything sufficient about templates!?!!!)
ends up with google search results that are just all over the place -
many different domains have stuff from the author of ATS himself, let
alone all the other (2 or 3) places that are do-gooders trying to blog
/ document more stuff about the language.
so basically there is no way to win: the official docs seem to not
help, and google searching just makes it look like everything is a
mess.
this is not the kind of user experience that will really help draw in new
users.
i urge people who have control of the ‘official’ stuff that is out
there to do things to rectify this if they actually want the
language to gain traction. i mean, i’m offering this advice for free
or you can go pay $$$ to some web marketing genius to get similar
comments (but only if they are actually good).
[all this can probably done in the course of a week at least as a
quick and dirty first pass of coalescing things. heck you might be
able to get a Technical Writer / SEO type undergraduate to do this
work in exchange for some credit, no?]
(a) have at most 2 places: github & then some core official ats docs site.
(b) remove everything else anywhere else official (i’m not saying
bluishcoder et. al. sites must die, far from it! only the disparate
‘official’ looking stuff). get rid of sourceforge for crying out loud.
(c) how many different mailing lists are there, anyway? google?
sourceforge? mailman? others? whittle them down as much as possible.
(d) i believe the documentation should be restructured. my off the
cuff suggestion is to have only the current version showing up at the
“root” of the docs / on the home page. then the others can be
available but off the main page.
(e) is there a formal language spec anywhere? that would be good to
have as a first link. that way while the informal documentation is
catching up over time, at least somebody has a way to find some
answer even if it is technically over their head
that’s what i think would minimally be good to staunch the problems i
see. after that, more iterations can be done to further improve.
Interested parties might like to look at adding ATS ports for some of
the missing examples. These are good for looking up how to perform
tasks rather than learning about particular features though.
I have just updated the existing ATS-examples at rosettacode to
make sure that they can run under ATS2. There is no need to add
ATS1-examples anymore.On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 10:42:51 PM UTC-4, Chris Double wrote:
For learning languages ‘cookbook’ style I’ve found the following
useful for picking up other languages:
Interested parties might like to look at adding ATS ports for some of
the missing examples. These are good for looking up how to perform
tasks rather than learning about particular features though.
this is not just a
this is not just a