I'm in agreement with Arno. Paul Thompson/Joy Hembel Professor and Senior Scientist Director, Methodology and Data Analysis Center Sanford Research 900 W Delaware Sioux Falls, SD 57104 O: 605-312-6462 M: 618-974-0473 H: 605-332-1587 F: 605-328-0401 909 N. Charleston Circle Sioux Falls, SD 57110 605-332-1587 ________________________________ From: Arno Trautmann <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 11:25 AM Subject: Re: missing or unclear concept documentation Hi all, Frank Mittelbach wrote: >> (I'm starting to like expl3 quite a lot. Me too ;) >> But I'm still unsure about >> the concrete meaning of some concepts, this make it a bit difficult >> to decide in which part of the documentation to look for something. > > any identification of such parts you feel unsure about would be helpful > I guess. Might be difficult to articulate, but please try. I'm not Ulrike, but I may have a similar problem: My usage of l3* stuff is: If I have a problem, I try to find a solution in the documentation, and if does what it should anyhow, I'm satisfied. However, often I just don't understand the concepts of the whole stuff. Which is also (besides heavy time problems) a reason why I don't try to contribute to the development. > Joseph is making quite some effort to improve on the overall > documentation but we are well aware that documentation of certain > general concepts is effectively missing or bad and I'm sure some > concepts we take for granted (having worked with it for quite a while) > may not at all be obvious to new users Maybe a two-page introduction in the documentation describing the basic concepts would be helpfull. And, maybe even more important, at least for me personally, a kind-of-a-roadmap where the development is going. That may be in three parts, short-term, middle-term and long-term. Maybe it is my personal fault, but I have no idea of where L3 is supposed to go, in which steps, etc. If it is the policy of the team to keep this non-public, it is sad, but ok. If not, it should be made more public – that doesn't have to be much text, nor must it be too concrete or ultimate decisions. The L3 news are a good step in that direction, but they mostly “only” report on what has happened. cheers Arno