--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Look around and find something whose documentation you like,
> and copy that concept.
> Do you like the mathematica "bible" and its on-line version?
Personally I do - in my experience it has been helpful.
> Do you like the commercial macsyma stuff?
Their quick reference sheets, the only macsyma docs I've seen, are
nice. I don't know where to locate a copy of the full commercial
macsyma documentation - it sure doesn't seem to be online. Since that
would more than likely be very useful for us, does anyone know of an
online copy of their manual somewhere?
> Do you like documentation for (say) Word or Excel?
Um, don't use 'em - anybody have a comment on their docs?
> It may also help to have targeted audiences.
> e.g.
> education/ k-12; college/ more.
> application / finance; physics; /etc.
That's probably a very good idea - moreover, for the educational side
of things, maybe we can write a few "training wheel" packages which
will make some basic assumptions that ordinarily wouldn't be made for
real world use, to address uses such as those that have been mentioned
over the past few days. I do think we should have some general
documentation for the basics, but since a lot of the stuff people have
said they plan to port to maxima will be very specific to one thing or
another it wouldn't make sense under most cases to include those in a
general doc.
> I still find the idea of having one person write a program
> and another one "document" it 20 or 30 years later to be
> bizarre. But that is what we have as a task.
Yep. Just the nature of the game, I guess.
CY
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