lack of contributors

[Matt Revelle]

Hi Waldemar,

If you're interested in helping out with tutorial-type documentation,
there's an infogami site for it: http://slate.infogami.com.  It's open
for anyone to contribute, and you don't have to muck with HTML or
figure out darcs.

The goal is to help more people understand Slate's features and
idioms.  The pages contain mostly learn-by-example stuff, but code
comparisons to other languages should also be added.

Matt

On 4/1/06, Brian Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
> > Slate is too complex. It does not feel very elegant. You have to
> > learn too many concepts and rules (inheritance, role-based
> > dispatch, precedence, traits slots, delegation, macros,
> > syntax, ...). You should take this more seriously. One quickly gets
> > overwhelmed by Slate.
>
> I'm hard-pressed to find what I should do about it. That's why I
> invite people to write tutorials covering it, because the manual is a
> ***reference*** and not didactic at all. It cannot be my job to teach
> people Slate, because I live in it and cannot get my mind out of that
> perspective. I just CAN'T do it. Similarly, if I wrote tutorials, I
> would have a harder time "swapping out" that information and
> "swapping in" Slate internal code information.
>
> I am going to re-iterate this: it cannot be my job to write teaching
> materials. If you find Slate too hard, then help others find it
> easier or don't use it and stop whining. Casual users just do not
> belong in a pre-1.0 language community.
>
> And Slate is that complex because those features are powerful. Remove
> any of those, and you remove the purpose of the project. I welcome
> simplification (Slate was originally supposed to be a concatenative
> language, for example), but you are surely not going to be the source
> of it.
>
> > The website greets you with a lot of information. Is the feature
> > list really needed on the front page? Those features don't tell me
> > very much. We want to know the *advantages* of Slate, a few
> > *examples*, and a few direct *comparisons* (Java, Squeak, ...).
>
> Would you like to do that? The website is made from a darcs
> repository at http://slate.tunes.org/repos/site/ . I would willingly
> accept patches for it. If they are not "polished", I can make a
> branch for the variation and try to improve it. At least make some
> mock-up pages or something.
>
> Honestly, though, if all this is hot air and you don't do anything
> substantial about it, don't expect me to be pleasant to you.
>
> --
> -Brian
> http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf
>
>
>
>