Re: upto current

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 3/22/2013 3:19 PM, Bill Meahan wrote:
> On 03/22/2013 03:31 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Maybe, we could setup a collaborative work group to do the documentation.
>>
>> That is a group of us are responsible for certain groups of commands.
>> This way
>> the manuals can become more complete. That way some of the more advance
>> stuff that is hardly documented finally gets documented.
>>
>> What we would need is a specification for:
>>    [snip]
> In 45+ years of programming[1] it has never ceased to amaze me how the
> wheel has to be reinvented for every new system whether language, macro
> package or whatever. Why do it again? Why not adopt some documentation
> system that is already widely-used and for which infrastructure and
> knowledge of use is already in place?
>
> I have no investment in any particular system. I'm happily generating
> other types of non-computer-related documents using reStructuredText
> since I can easily convert that various publication formats as required
> without separate source files for each format. It seems to me docutils
> has everything that would be needed to document ConTeXt and is very
> widely used given the popularity of Python (which makes me cringe). If
> doxygen or something else would work better, so be it. The point is,
> **use something that exists instead of expending time and effort
> reinventing the wheel yet again!**
>
> [1] I was, am and will be a "programmer" and not a "software developer"
> or "software engineer." The term adequately depicts what I did/do while
> the others are simply too pretentious. Find the old article "Real
> Programmers Don't Use Pascal" in an archive somewhere -- I've been a
> "real programmer" and I suspect Hans is, too. :)
>
> Sorry for the rants but it is so frustrating to have to install so many
> different language support and documentation systems simply because I
> use FOSS tools exclusively.

I can only speak for myself, but

- I did my share of programming (pascal, modula 2) when I university but 
at that time documentation was mostly in-source. My background is 
educational technology and not programming but I always ended up doing 
that. (I still have a stack of old listings somewhere of a formatter 
that I wrote for vms that took some kind of tagged ascii and paginated 
that etc.)

- Later on when I ended up in educational consultancy and development of 
all kind of educational stuff, context was developed simply because we 
needed a flexible typesetting tool. We also developed tools and 
workflows around it. Ha, there was no internet, at least not for us, so 
we didn't even know what else was around.

- So, whenever I have to write some documentation, I use context itself, 
after all, one needs to typeset examples. I normally pay a lot of 
attention to the document source code and can live with some tagging. If 
I had to do that in some * ** == -- & based ascii text format or 
whatever, I'd probably never write manuals (too much hassle to go beyond 
the obvious and not looking nice either, but that's personal).

- When I started with the command specification in xml, it was also 
because xml is easy to process, and (in mkiv) we can also easily filter 
based on expresssions. So, for that xml is quite natural for me. Just as 
nowadays lua is my natural choice and most of my current docs are a mix 
of mp, lua and tex, also depending on what looks nicest in document source.

- I happily leave additional documentation to others and whoever does 
that should should the tools he/she likes most. In these days one can 
always convert.

- But, to come back to your last comment: tex can typeset its own 
documentation so that's a rather natural choice for part of it.

Hans



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