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Posted by robert maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t on 03/10/07 11:05
> From: CBFalconer <cbfalco...@yahoo.com>
> Why should you want to accept corrections from a newbie when you
> ignore and/or argue over corrections from experts?
If you're talking about the pedagogical value of my document, i.e.
how well it enables a newbie programmer to find just the right
function quickly when needed rather than spend weeks or months in
frustration before just giving up:
- Because experts who already knows everything won't bother to use
my document as a reference source in the first place.
- Because the expert trying to proofread my document will either
interpret whatever I write, no matter how ill-stated or
ambiguous or actually wrong in some subtle way, as the *correct*
info he already knew, and thereby totally miss the mistakes, or
will be so nitpicky as to generate so many spurious complaints
as to totally swamp any useful feedback.
If and when you or other expert use my document to remind yourself
of some specific tool you've forgotten, and you then actually try
whatever library function my document suggests, and you discover it
doesn't work quite as I described, and you report that specific
erratum in a useful way rather than just bitching that the whole
document is crap, *then* I might accept your feedback about the
pedagogical value of my document and fix that one item you reported
as wrong. But given your attitude you've expressed in this thread,
I'm not holding my breath for any such useful errata.
Meanwhile, the novice is unfamiliar with 90% of what's in my
document, hence will be testing just about every thing I say, and
anything that doesn't work as I described it will hopefully be
reported back to me in a useful way, citing exactly what I said and
what piece of code he/she wrote that didn't work as expected.
If you want to validate a textbook, you have a group of students
actually try learning from it, you don't have a bunch of experts
nitpick it to death.
By the way, earlier today when the computer lab was open and I was
working on the Chinese language project, I discovered that both
AltaVista and Yahoo (and several other ISPs) implement their Web
service for BabelFish totally wrong. When translating English to
Chinese, they serve the Chinese in Latin-1 instead of UTF-8, which
totally discards the useful data. I had to search many Chinese
translation sites before I finall found one that served Chinese
output in UTF-8, so that "happy new year" translated to three
Chinese characters for:
- good/well
- year
- new
(in some order, I forget which) instead of three NUL bytes.
Somebody at AltaVista, and at Yahoo, and at most of the other
BabelFish sites, really screwed up bigtime!! Anyway, the one
good English->Chinese=UTF-8 translation site I found was:
<http://www.systransoft.com/>
Big winner, doing it right, horay!!!
My own Web services that deal with foreign stuff use UTF-8. For
example, here's a test/demo I created a few years ago when I was
hacking UTF-8 for the first time:
<http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/cgi-bin/tryutf.cgi>
I think AltaVista or Yahoo et al should hire me to do their
multi-language stuff *correctly*, at least present it in UTF-8
instead of Latin-1!! Crimany!!!
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