From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-03 07:51:51
Sebastian Redl <sebastian.redl_at_[hidden]> writes:
> Paul Giaccone wrote:
>
>>The issue is this: the current documents say "Library X does Y", or, in
>>functional notation, y = foo(x). If you know x, you can find y.
>>Unfortunately, the new user knows y, and so needs x = bar(y), where
>>bar() is the inverse of foo(). (What's more, the user doesn't even know
>>that they need x = bar(y) because they don't know that Boost deals with
>>y by providing bar(y) until they start hunting through the docs.)
>>
>>
> The problem is that foo(x) returns multiple values, thus there are more
> bar(y) functions for each x than is practical to list. In other words, x
> and y are not isomorphic.
>
> To get away from the analogy, what I'm saying is that since there is no
> standardized description for each problem that each user comes up with
> intuitively, a user searching for specific functionality can take no
> shortcuts - he'll still have to search through the short description of
> each library, for which the alphabetic library list is adequate, and the
> categorized listing even more so. (The descriptions could be made a bit
> longer, perhaps. Perhaps.)
Now, now. Let's not discourage innovation in improving the site and
docs. If Paul thinks it can be done better, he should try something
and see how it works out.
-- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com