What about making sense?

[Michael Turner]

On 2/17/2010, "Robert Virding" <rvirding@REDACTED> wrote:

>Without getting into the discussion how difficult, or not, it is to
>navigate the Erlang docs one source of the problem is that all the
>standard OTP libraries are proper Applications.

People should think of the trigonometric functions as part of the STDLIB
Application, just because gen_server is grouped in with them, in stdlib?

What sense does this make?

> So when when the
>documentation is organised around "applications", in one sense, it is
>being entirely logical and consistent. Of course, until you are more
>experienced and groked this it can be very confusing and difficult to
>find things.

But in the meantime, conceptual/terminological confusion impedes the
learner, whenever he/she needs to resort to the Reference Manual.  Given
that Erlang already poses quite a learning curve for some, this will
reduce the rate at which people become "more experienced and grok
this", and for that matter, it will reduce the number of people who
even want to get that far with Erlang.

What sense does this make?

What goal does this serve?

The goal of making it easier to autogenerate the documentation?

Well, I remember the days when we humans did a lot of things to make life
easier for the system.  As I recall, it involved punching a lot of cards.


-michael turner