[erlang-questions] string:lexeme/s2 - an old man's rant

[empro2@REDACTED]

On Wed, 8 May 2019 12:39:55 +1200
"Richard O'Keefe" <raoknz@REDACTED> wrote:

> All things considered, this is a function I am never
> going to use, because it is less work to write my own
> than to try to figure out this documentation.  And I
> had to look at the code to figure some of it out.

Glad to hear! With all this much appreciated precious
effort gone and going into Erlang (including its
documentation), I was not sure whether it was merely my own
personal stupidity. Well, it still might be, as it is not
only `tokens/2` that takes me too far away from coding
and designing.


> I get seriously confused by some of the code in
> string.erl.

Who is supposed to believe that?! ;-)
Seriously, that would make me shut down everything and take
extensive walks before reworking everything ...


> Writing good documentation is HARD.  At dear departed
> Quintus, we started with a full time technical writer
> and expanded to three, nearly as many as developers.

"Limited resources" was one of the first items on my list.
The link in this anniversary posting

<http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2017-December/094396.html>

proved that I had correctly guessed all the points
mentioned in it.

My basic intention is to somehow generate so much
community help that the Erlang/OTP team gets so bored that
they go and replace records with frames :-)

"What is to become of my life, dreaming days away ...?"

~Michael

-- 

“Even after a thousand explanations a fool is no wiser,
whereas someone intelligent requires only one fourth of
these.”

	– from the Mahābhārata (महाभारत)