Documentation & Books

[Judy Perry]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Is the problem really just documentation, or could there be something
> inherent in the nature of programming that doesn't appeal as strongly to
> "right-brainers"?

--Possibly... I am recalling that nearly half of my teacher-ed testing
pool were self-described "technophobes", but I am convinced that beyond
the people who have a absolute mental block about it, that the key is in
the presentation.  By way of personal example, even though I'm obviously
no programmer, my department for a while (back before huge budget cuts)
was encouraging me to learn Pascal, which we then used in our intro to
programming course as they wanted me to teach the course.

So, I dutifully grabbed the Pascal textbook we were using and had a look
at chapter one... and right away got the heebie-jeebies.  Not no way, no
how.

Once I had calmed down and started breathing normally again, I saw in the
department's library an old book on learning Apple's Pascal.  I decided to
take another look.  Chapter one flew by, no problems.  So, what was the
problem?

I took the two books and laid them side-by-side and compared the content
of each (which was virtually identical).  It's not that the Apple book was
baby-programming, it was that it was presented in a more, ahem,
"user-friendly" manner.  Ditto for Chris Crawford's book on I think BASIC.

> If you'll pardon the reductio ad absurdum, there's a point to it:
>
> Programming is an analytic meditation, in which a goal is broken down
> into tasks, and those tasks broken down into lines of code.  While I
> believe good programming also involves the "right-brain" skill of
> pattern recognition, the analytic nature of the task may be a
> contributing factor to why programming is something only a subset of
> humanity finds enjoyable.

--Interesting observation on programming as pattern recognition.  The
literature suggests that this is the predominant technique utilized by
expert programmers in debugging (did you ever get the stack I thought I
sent you containing snippets from the literature?).

I have a reductio ad absurdum of my own.  How many of you out there were
'persuaded' to take piano lessons as a child?  How many of you continued
beyond a year or so?  Why did you quit?

My parents made me take piano.  I loathed it. Nothing but stupid scales
and finger exercises that didn't even remotely sound like music.

A few years later, I signed up for flute and was in the school's band and
orchestra.  And, you know what?  I stuck with it (still play for my kids
occasionally today).  Sure, there were still scales and stuff, but it was
interspersed with actually playing music.  Immediate payoff.

There will likely always be the 5% or whatever of the population that
lives for fiddling with code and designing better algorithms and the like.
But there's a huge potential for normal humans who just want to produce
something.  This immediate payoff I think is what made HC hugely
successful among the normal human population -- it was, as I think it was
Don Norman who said, minimally productive/useful out of the box.

And Rev can be too. But it needs better/different (probably more of the
latter than the former; I really don't hate the docs) documentation and
probably a completely different presentation/UI.

Judy